Lesson Plan for RCF: 1/31/14

I. Anne:
Welcome!
[rest of us welcome late-comers, get chairs, etc.]

Home work was to read Chapter 1 of
Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle.
Read two opening paragraphs aloud together, and then discuss:
What is going on here? What do you see? (ex: “Mom,” not “my mother”)
focus in on p.o.v.—>
can we re-tell this from the mother’s p.o.v.?
what would this story look like then?
what would be brought to the foreground/what pushed to the background?

II. Sasha:
Your writing assignment for today was to do the same
thing Walls did in the opening pages of her memoir--
to write three pages describing your own mother:
what does she look like on the outside?
What does she feel like on the inside?
We asked you to be as concrete and specific as Walls is, in her first chapter…
to think about who is doing the talking: whose voice is speaking?
Or: who are you, looking @ her? What are your surroundings?
And who is she, looking back @ you and talking to you?
What are her surroundings?

Who did this assignment?
Tell us what it was like….
Describe what you learned while doing it…
Don’t tell us what you wrote, but how you wrote.
Focus on the process: what was hard, what came easily,
what surprised you?

Hand these in now;
we’ll type them up and give feedback.

III. Hayley:
Sara and I also typed up what you wrote last week,
your “Phenomenal Women” poems--
here are copies. (We’ll actually be collecting all
our writing to create a book by the end of the class,
so if we made any mistakes in transcription of your words
(or your names!) tell us and we'll fix these in the final copies.
A lot of you sounded the keynote of “home” in your poems.

I want you to listen to several of these:
Yesenia wrote, “I’m here/Doing what I have to do so I can come home/And do what’s right….”

Stacey wrote, “A House is made of Brick/A Home is made of Love.”

Dominque wrote, "My shin explains where I come from/My feet explains where I be/You know me the girl from 11th street"

Jessica wrote, "I know that I’m here and my family don’t know me and when I was out there I was known by them."

We’re going to take 15 minutes now, in silence, to write about “home.”
Write down one of these lines, and use it as a “story starter”--
just write from that as a starting line in your own essay:

“I’m here/Doing what I have to do so I can come home/And do what’s right….”
OR
“A House is made of Brick/A Home is made of Love.”
OR
"My shin explains where I come from/My feet explains where I be/You know me the girl from 11th street"
OR
"I know that I’m here and my family don’t know me and when I was out there I was known by them."

IV. Jody:
finish the sentence you are writing.
We’re not going to read aloud what we’ve written so far--
we’re going touse this writing as a first step towards some homework…
but let’s talk a little about what we’ve been learning in this writing.
Do we have a definition of “home”? Of “homeless”?

Homework: Write a story about being @ home and being homeless.
Think about point of view: how different does the story look,
from different perspectives?

Read the first 1/3 of Wall’s memoir for the next class (to p. 101).

Don’t forget to bring back your writing!