Slice of Life

I am trying to do more writing and to use mentor texts and models with my students. Today I showed the freshmen some of my first draft writing. They were pretty funny when I asked them to identity things that made it first draft. They were rather critical. "There were cross outs and punctuation missing." "It was hard to follow." "It was hard to read because it was in cursive." "It was really long." "There were a lot of thoughts in it and the thesis wasn't really clear."

They acted like it should have been perfect because I wrote it, even though I told them it was first draft writing and explained some of my writing process. I hope that at least a few of them got the idea of first draft writing. The idea of multiple drafts and revision is so foreign to them. They want to write it once and be done with it.

On the positive side of things, today the freshmen turned in their short original historical fiction pieces. Some pretty amazing pieces came in! Three of them were willing to read their writing to the class. Two really great short stories and one poem with rhyming that worked! I'm looking forward to reading the rest of them.