1. Opening Activities

2. Reading

3. Reading

4. Top 10 Lists
Make a Top 10 list of your favorite movies or directors

5. Six-Word Memoirs: Examples
All things considered, I’m doing well.
The past is forgiven, not forgotten.
So the water’s deep. Man up.
Teach, grade, travel, speak, write: tired.

6. POW
Plan
Organize
Write

7. RADaR Revision Strategy
R—Replace words that are not specific, words that are overused, and sentences that are unclear
A—Add new information, descriptive adjectives and adverbs, rhetorical or literary devices
D—Delete unrelated ideas, sentences that sound good but create unity problems, unwanted repetition, and unnecessary details
and
R—Reorder to make better sense or flow better and so details support main ideas
Kelly Gallagher’s Write Like This: Teaching Real-World Writing Through Modeling and Mentor Texts

8. How to Give Feedback
Write down an author’s golden lines on a Post-it note
Golden lines are the best lines of a piece of writing. These are the lines that stand out, the lines that reach you, lines you connect with
Peter Elbow

9. Food for Thought
Ernest Hemingway says that we only need to write “one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” Let us take that idea and apply it to specific types of food. Compose the truest sentence you know about a certain type of food.

10. More Food for Thought
Ernest Hemingway says that we only need to write “one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” Let us take that idea and apply it to geographical locations. Compose the truest sentence you know about the place you are writing about in “36 Hours in”.

11. Quote of the Day
“I still remember the exact moment when I first understood…the purpose of a paragraph…I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence.”—Sherman Alexie, “Superman and Me”

12. Quote of the Day
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”—Anais Nin

13. Quote of the Day
“Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little.”—Playwright Tom Stoppard

14. Quote of the Day
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write.”—William Faulkner

15. Quote of the Day
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture, just get them to stop reading them.”—Ray Bradbury