6-Word Memoirs

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6-WORD MEMOIRS

My students are currently working on a multimodal Author Study in which they are both focusing upon the connection between the author’s life and work and the ways in which our society makes and expresses meaning through the texts we read, see, hear, and watch.

One method that I am incorporating as a way for students to show a developed understanding of their author is the 6-Word Memoir. They will ultimately compose a collection of these short but (hopefully) insightful pieces in the voices of their chosen author and characters from selected novels. But first, they got some practice by creating their own.

I set up this page in our class VLE with resources for them to use:

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The page included my overview of the 6-Word Memoir concept, a video (thank you, NWP Digital.Is) of student examples, a classic example (Hemingway’s “For sale:baby shoes; never worn”) that conveys the proper beginning-middle-end structure, and my own example.

Important to completing this personal memoir assignment properly was the incorporation of an image that helped fill the gaps left by the short textual format. This was in-line with the essential question of the unit “How do we make and express meaning through the texts we read, see, hear, and watch.”

Some of the kids definitely got it:

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Especially important for me was watching my students access apps on their phones that previously had no “academic” merit. Great convergence of home-and-school technology!


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