The Book of Us project.
The Book of Us project was a project designed for us to create our own stories and make a team book out of them with the real world topics that we had to choose from(Real world writing purposes "Field Guide"). The topic I chose was Express and Reflect and that was basically talking about something you have feelings for and the outreach to others by reflecting on your own experience(Graphic Organizer). It all started off with one of Dr. Patton's 10 minute free writes but only this time we were given a prompt to write about a time that "Once I almost, One lesson I learned the hard way was, and the best thing I ever did is." This was a really cool opening into the project because I didn't have much pressure on the fact that what I am writing right now will influence my final draft for the book of us , so I wrote about a time I almost died surfing. As harsh as that sounds it really wasn't that bad, I liked how for this prompt I was able to speak out of my heart and put it onto paper because I knew what I was going to write about as soon as I saw the prompt. Very soon after we were done with that whole free write, my teacher introduced a book from his last students that they wrote in and shared it with us so we can have an idea of what we were going to want on ours and what we weren't by critiquing it. This helped a lot because we got to see the actual book and read some of the stories students put and it really gave me a clear understanding on what he was trying to get out of us. Once we all were writing about one of the real world topics we analyzed Mentor Texts to help us see professional articles or story's and try to get influenced by them as much as possible for helping create our story for the book of us. To top it all of we submitted our stories (Surfer Stroke) to the teacher and we then had to critique our peers stories and give feed back to try to get as close to perfection as possible.
Graphic Organizer
Down Draft
Golden Lines portrait
Mentor Text Graphic Organizer
Final Draft (Surfer Stroke)
(Take a stand quick write)
Graphic Organizer
Down Draft
Golden Lines portrait
Mentor Text Graphic Organizer
Final Draft (Surfer Stroke)
(Take a stand quick write)
Book of Us Reflection
What I originally wanted to write for this project was about the first time I almost experienced death as a surfer but I figured that was too crazy and I ended up picking the topic of when I first went surfing. I was able to write about my death experience really good but I figured along the way that just talking about how much I love surfing is way much easier. So i ended up writing an express and reflect on the first time I went surfing. When I was done with my first draft we had a critique group session and It didn't really help me because the lengths of others papers took to much time and mine was read until the end so I didn't get much feed back. of course there were other critique sessions but I feel like the mentor text my teacher gave me was the perfect thing that I needed. Once I saw the mentor text it really helped me form my final draft by adding better vocabulary and relating experiences that the mentor text and I both had. For this whole project i took on the role of photographer and I believe I documented every ones work every well. The only thing I did not like about this project is that I was too caught up with work from other classes and everything just combined but I managed to get through it. But over all I believe that this was a pretty successful project.