Focus Question: What is a reflective essay?
To read thought-provoking quotes regarding memory, go to a quotation website. Share the following quotes, for instance, from http://www.quotegarden.com/memory.html:
“We do not remember days; we remember moments.” —Cesare Pavese, The Burning Brand
“The past is never dead. It is not even past.” —William Faulkner
“In memory’s telephoto lens, distant objects are magnified.” —John Updike
“The sense of smell can be extraordinarily evocative, bringing back pictures as sharp as photographs of scenes that have left the conscious mind.” —Thalassa Cruso, To Everything There Is a Season
“Memory is a complicated thing, relative to truth, but not its twin.” — Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams
"Select a quote that you have read and provide an explanation or response for it." (Set an example for the class by choosing a quote of your own to discuss and analyze.) "Please feel free to add any additional details or comments as you are responding in your own words." Remark that the memories associated with strong emotions are the ones we retain the longest and are the easiest to recall if the topic is not brought up during the conversation. We tend to remember moments that were particularly amusing, embarrassing, enraged, happy, or filled with any other intense emotion. We tend to forget about moments that were uneventful or mundane. If you were to look through a student's journal, you would most likely find entries about their exciting experiences, such as successfully pulling off a practical joke, learning to ride a bike, going water skiing for the first time, catching a monster fish, and so on. They are less likely to write about mundane experiences, such as their first time doing the dishes or tying their shoes in the morning.
It is recommended to introduce personal narratives to your students.
Have students go to the following websites to learn about reflective writing: (http://essaywritinghelp.com/reflective.htm) or read the section on personal narratives in their textbook.
Describe or review the components of a personal, reflective, or narrative essay:
Describe in writing a significant life event.
Express your feelings and ideas about the event, and make it obvious how important it is.
Use a first-person perspective when writing about yourself.
Narrate the story in the order that it occurs.
Pace your story with transitions.
Use dialogue, action, vivid imagery, and clear language to add interest to your essay.
Use your voice to personalize this essay.
Once students have read an example reflective essay (LW-7-1-2_Sample Narrative Questions), have them respond to the sample narrative questions. Choose an essay from the following sources: The Write Source (http://www.thewritesource.com/studentmodels), your essay, an essay from a previous student, or the Sample Personal Narrative (LW-7-1-2_Sample Narrative) provided in this unit. Once you've confirmed that each student has answered the list independently, have them share and compare their answers in pairs before reviewing the list as a class.
After allowing students to answer the questions individually, they should then compare their responses in pairs and finalize them in groups. Emphasize that each component works together to create a compelling personal narrative. When assessing their writing, students should revisit this list to ensure they have included all necessary components.
Afterward, please assign the students to complete the "Practicing Descriptive Writing" exercise (LW-7-1-2_Practicing Descriptive Writing). This will help them gain experience with precise language and elaboration. If any students appear to be having trouble, you can place them in pairs so that they can support each other's creative thought processes. Additionally, the students can use a thesaurus to help refresh their memory with synonyms. However, you should caution them against just mindlessly substituting words with similar meanings. Before students turn in their work, ask for volunteers to present their responses to the class. Encourage them to share what they like about particular rewritten sentences. Finally, remind the students that when writing their narratives, they should use the same level of precision and detail.
Provide the following rubric and essay assignment to students: Refer to the state's scoring guidelines (LW-7-1-2_PSSA Writing Scoring Guidelines) or use the End of Unit Assessment sample rubric. While explaining the assignment's requirements, have students go over the Personal Narrative Assignment handout (LW-7-1-2_Personal Narrative Assignment):
Topic: Write a personal story based on one of your journal entries.
Objectives: Examine your thoughts and emotions regarding a particular incident and inform your audience about how your life experiences shaped you.
Audience: your teacher and other classmates.
Organization: Follow a chronological order. Note: Although this is only one possible narration organization method, it is the most common. Write your account of the events in the chronological order that they occurred. What were the first, second, and third events?
Employ transitions to break up and enhance paragraphs.
Organize your essay into an introduction, multiple body paragraphs, and a conclusion.
Introduction: Captures readers' attention while hinting at the significance or meaning of the event.
§ Body: Provides readers with an overview of the event's key facts as well as your opinions and feelings.
Conclusion: Summarize the event and reflect on how it affected you.
Devices and elements of literature:
Write in the first person. Write your story using the pronoun "I" throughout.
Use dialogue, details, and imagery to bring the reader into the story and reveal the characters, the conflict, the setting, and your feelings.
Language:
Make varied use of simple, compound, and complex sentence structures.
For tone and voice, use words with movement. Incorporate clear adjectives and adverbs, vivid verbs, and specific nouns.
Apply the appropriate conventions.
"Use this personal narrative organizer to spark some ideas over time." Give students a graphic organizer you create, or use the one available at http://www.
timeforkids.com/files/homework_helper/aplus_papers/PersonalNarrativeorganizer.pdf
"Now that you have completed your graphic organizer, form groups of three to four people." Permit students to select these groups so that they feel at ease enough to share their original writing. "In your groups, exchange journals with each other. As you read, consider the key points from each group member's journal. You aim to come up with meaningful statements together. Additionally, you need to explain the significance of your story. This includes your motivation for sharing your story and why the reader should be interested in what you have to say."
Each student will select a significant statement with the help of the group. This statement will be the thesis of the essay and will be mentioned in the last paragraph. "It is important to highlight these ideas or phrases in the final paragraph of your journal. As writers, it is our responsibility to conclude with a statement that ties together all of our reflections. Now that you know when your journal will end, we can begin outlining the introduction, body, and conclusion."
Use this model to help students create outlines:
I. Introduction
A. Grabber of Attention
B. Allude to the event's importance
II. Body: Occurrences, feelings, and ideas, potentially in chronological sequence
III. Conclusion: Concluding remarks and significance statement
Ask students to write their introductions for their first drafts.
Personal narratives, like other essays, require an eye-catching statement that captures the reader's attention. This can be achieved through the use of quotations, imagery, action, conversation, bold statements, and other attention-grabbing techniques. It's important to examine the attention grabber used in the sample essay and provide additional examples to students who are struggling to come up with one.
The introduction's last sentence or two should make or suggest a point about the event's significance. It should also clarify or hint at the main idea and importance of the essay. The point made should be more than just an assertion or fact. For example:
"I could not have been more wrong—I just thought that hanging out with my friends was more important than spending time with my family."
It is recommended to review the assignment guidelines and the rubric with the students before they begin writing their body paragraphs. It is essential to emphasize that they should focus on developing their statement of significance. You can provide them with a copy of LW-7-1-2_Useful Transitions, which is a list of helpful transitions they can refer to as needed. Additionally, you can distribute the LW-7-1-2_Possible Tones list of potential tones to encourage students to choose a writing style. Although students may not be familiar with every word on the list, they can still learn that most of the words in each line have a similar meaning. This way, even if they don't know the meaning of a word, they can still learn enough about the word in question to get a good idea of what it means.
As your students begin to draw their conclusions, it is important to remind them to revisit the significance of the event they have been writing about. This should be a more detailed and comprehensive statement than the hint provided in the introduction. Be sure to walk around and evaluate the student's work to ensure that they have understood the concept and provide feedback accordingly.
Language Skills Mini-Lesson
"You will start editing your work in the upcoming lesson. Let's review how to use phrases and clauses in sentences as a means of getting ready. Avoiding sentence fragments can be achieved by following a few easy rules."
"To begin with, what is a phrase?" (a collection of connected words lacking a coherent idea) "Complete sentences frequently contain multiple phrases. For instance, there are multiple phrases in the sentence: 'Our basketball team has a game after after classes.'" Write this sentence on the board and give it the following label:
Our basketball group (noun phrase)
has an activity (verb phrase)
after school. (Prepositional expression)
"What is a clause?" (A collection of words with a subject and a verb) "There are two categories of clauses: dependent and independent. An independent clause completes a sentence on its own. Therefore, a dependent clause logically needs an independent clause to form a complete sentence; it cannot stand alone." Put the following sentence in writing on the board:
When the game starts, I’ll be cheering from the stands.
"There are independent and dependent clauses in this sentence. Which independent clause could function as a sentence on its own?" (I'll be cheering from the stands.) "What is the clause that lacks a complete sentence on its own—the dependent clause?" (When the game starts.) The sentence 'When the game starts' has a noun (game) and a verb (starts), but it is incomplete. If nothing came after that clause, the reader would be left wondering, 'What? What will occur when the game begins?'
"Now that you have finished drafting your essays, proofread them to look for instances where dependent clauses are punctuated improperly in sentences." (End with a period.) "Revise your essay only once. When you have dependent clauses displayed as sentences, highlight or circle them." Give the students a few minutes to complete this.
"After you're done, exchange essays with a friend. Look for any dependent clauses that have sentence structure when you read your partner's essay. If your partner has already highlighted a dependent clause, confirm that it is not a complete sentence. Look for any more dependent clauses that may have gone unnoticed and have been punctuated as sentences. Either underline or encircle them." Again, give this review a few minutes.
"Review the dependent clauses that you discovered in the essays as a group. Can each dependent clause be converted into a sentence? Is it feasible to include an independent clause? Should this sentence be combined with a nearby sentence? Work together to enhance the dependent clauses."
Encourage student participation by asking them to annotate a problematic dependent clause on the board. Have the author read the sentences before and after the dependent clause to provide context and potential solutions. Allow other students to make recommendations for improving the problem. Then, ask partners to complete the sentence and discuss why a different suggestion was better. Finally, urge the writer to rewrite the sentence.
Extension:
Check out an article like "What Is a Memory Made of?" by Joanne M. Schrof in U.S. News & World Report, August 18, 1997, pages 71–72, to learn more about the processes involved in memory formation and retrieval.
Examine an essay model, such as "Eleven" by Sandra Cisneros, or perhaps a model from the professional world.
