Memoir "assumes the life and ignores most of it…it's a window into a life, very much like a photograph." 3 Memoir is ideal for younger writers because children can easily draw upon their own life experience the challenge is to discover why that experience was important to them. Memoir, opposed to autobiographical writing, takes a small moment in a person's life which transforms that person in a meaningful way 2 whereas autobiography typically looks at a person's life as a whole. Students automatically write right where they are and we, as teachers, can push them forward from their own natural starting point. This is a tall order as children come to us with varying ability and experience however, the beauty of writing is that it is inherently self-differentiated. My hope is that this unit, tailored to urban 3 rd graders in the Bay Area community of Emeryville, California, will boost children's writing fluency and help them to develop more advanced sentence structure, punctuation and grammar, descriptive language, dialogue, and ultimately reflective analysis of special moments in their lives. Though other writing genres, including fiction, expository writing, and poetry will be taught throughout the year, memoir offers a special opportunity to let children explore what they know best, their own life stories, in a thoughtful, reflective way which can improve their writing in general as they cross over to other writing genres. Kindergarten and 1 st grade teachers do an excellent job of teaching children the foundation of handwriting, phonics and basic sentence structure but by 2 nd grade many children are stuck, too intimidated to take these fundamental skills to the next level because their writing ability has not kept in pace with their language skills. One of the hardest subjects to teach, and typically one of the hardest subjects for young children to master, is the art of descriptive writing. My unit will focus on building a curriculum where children's basic knowledge of reading and writing will become a spring board to more creative and descriptive writing about their own life story. 1 Because of this, their writing skills do not grow at the same pace as their verbal ability, creative thinking, and imagination. Once confident and courageous about their ability, children as young as 2 nd grade begin to feel defeated and stop taking chances. This exuberance quickly dulls over the next two decades as many children go through the process of learning. Young children in their primary years begin their educational journey full of wonder and enthusiasm. Memoir: Magical Moments in Young Children's Lives by Camille Pires Introduction
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