Six-Word Memoirs

The school year has begun, and this year I’ve looped up to fifth grade with my two groups of kids from last year. So far I have loved coming back and just starting in – it seems like we just had a long weekend, and we’re back at it. But one of my concerns was making sure that fifth grade didn’t just feel like a repeat of fourth grade, so I knew I had to alter the routine a bit, and start with something we didn’t do last year. 

The May 2014 issue of The Reading Teacher featured an article called “Every Word is on Trial: Six-Word Memoirs in the Classroom,” by Jane M. Saunders and Emily E. Smith. Students work to come up with six words that describe them or something they are interested in, and then find an image to enhance their memoir. That sounded like something doable (six words isn’t many), fun (computer lab), and it would be a great way to start and finish a writing project the first week.

Following the suggestions in the article, we first looked at Ernest Hemingway’s famous memoir, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”  It was a great place to start, as we did a lot of inferencing about what he could have meant. I then pulled up some examples on brainpickings.org of elementary six-word memoirs (www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/09/six-word-memoirs-students), which gave my students some ideas for their work. I was careful to stop at the middle school level, as some of the examples are a little racier than I wanted to share with my class.  Then students all worked to come up with several examples, discussing with classmates if they were short a word or had too many. It was fun to see the discussions of how to condense ideas, or how to change words around to get the best effect. Punctuation also becomes important if you aren’t writing complete sentences, so some students experimented with colons and commas.

After choosing the memoir they liked best, we headed into the computer lab. The article gives many great suggestions of how to present the memoirs, but in the end, I just had students open up a Word document, and then we searched for images on Flickr as they did in the article. Once an image was selected, students dragged them into the Word document, and then typed the memoir below the image. We printed them off in black and white, and then students had the option of using colored pencils to make them more colorful. 

I hung them all up outside our room, and students have really enjoyed reading what others have written. Several staff members have also commented on how nicely they turned out. One colleague suggested doing this periodically throughout the year and using them as a chronicle of fifth grade, which I really like. I also think students could do this as a short way of synthesizing information from other subject areas. I’m going to experiment with this writing form throughout the year and see what I think. For now, it was a great way to start our new year off together.  

Here is my example that I showed the students.