1. Session 6: Studying the Power of Emotion
Concept:
Reading Immersion and Drafting Memoir

2. Teaching Point
Copy in NB: Emotions take center stage as memoirists modulate the emotional territory of their memoirs. They explore the personal emotions of their own lived experiences as well as imagine the emotions they want to generate for a reader.

3. Lesson Quote Glue in NB:
Why I Write. Three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: “I”.
In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear Joan Didion

4. Model and Think-Aloud
Let’s look at today’s model memoir and annotate the first 1/3 together
What is the angle of this story?
How are emotions revealed?
Actions? Dialogue? Thoughts? Narrator Commentary?

5. Active Engagement
On your own, annotate the next 1/3 of the text the same way we just did together
Turn and Talk: Compare annotations and talk about the impact of the author’s choices on creating or maintaining the emotional tension in the memoir.

6. Active Engagement, cont.
Report Out: Answer these questions –
How are the emotions of the narrator or other characters in the memoir revealed?
How does this focus on emotions impact the reader?

7. Independent Practice
Mini-Task 1: Read the rest of the memoir. Turn and compare your annotations with your partner before you start generating and tracking a new event and idea.
Mini-Task 2: Reread and annotate a classmate’s memoir to identify the decisions used to control the emotional territory of the emblematic memory that was written in Session 5 during our last class.

8. Report Out
What are the most common decisions used by classmates? How and why are these decisions effective?

9. Mini-Task 3: Write For the next 20 minutes:
Write about an emotional event that might seem quite ordinary and almost routine.
Use the decisions you have studied in the mentor text and your classmate’s writing.

10. Turn and Talk: Share
Small Group Read-Around: Read your favorite entry in your NB thus far. State why you are connected to this entry.

11. Reflection #6 Copy ?s in your NB and respond (5 min):
As you wrote again, what worked today? What did not?
How did you adjust your writing process to keep writing to track of your decisions?