Memoirs


This year students wrote memoirs as their personal narrative for our first writing unit in language arts. We spent a considerable amount of time on mini-lessons that addressed the following:
*generating story ideas
*characteristics of memoirs
*hooking the reader
*focusing on the main event
*showing not telling using the senses
*good endings
*revision and editing skills



As a final assessment, they were asked to self-assess using the following rubric. The rubric begins with a grade 4 level to the left and works towards a grade 7 level of writing proficiency. This rubric was adapted from materials from TCRWP (Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project). The original rubric is about 4 pages long; however, we knew that this would overwhelm our student population in which many of them are ELL's. So, we adapted this rubric to make it more manageable.

Here are some examples of memoir writing from the beginner EAL students.