For this project we got the opportunity to end the year with improving our writing skills for junior year which is the year where we get in preparation for college applications and seeing what schools we qualify for. Throughout this mini-project we got to work on description, dialogue and formats about how to write a hero's story. The final product for this project was to create narratives about important moments in our life whether they were good or bad and even just a funny story that you wanted to share, all of these stories that our class of 50 students produced and we then complied them into a book named Journey In Motion.
Project Launch
The way this project was launched was quite unusual some might say, but we had come into our classrooms after first period which was math for our team and we all came in and everyone fixed up the tables into rows as our teachers had said for us to put them in. Dr.P and Mrs. Soler came in, Dr.P had put up his daily slideshow that we all think he spends way too much time on and had asked us to take out our Write Club notebooks and start writing about the prompt he had put up which was about Internships for the upcoming school year. Everyone did so and then out of no where I heard a lot of noise coming from the front of the class and I look up to see Mrs. Soler furious, the next thing that happened was very out of the ordinary, she rapidly took off her shoe and aimed it at what seemed to be a student head and threw it. I couldn't believe what was unwrapping right in front of me because right after my very pregnant teacher had flung her shoe at somebody, Dr.P had then lost his mind as well and disregarded what had just happened and pulled out a vibrant sweatband and placed it over his head, he then began to run laps around the class room intertwining him self between the rows of the classroom. Dr.P then went back to the front of the class and began to take out a small plastic baseball bat and wife ball, he then threw the ball up into the air and then collided the plastic bat into it causing the ball to go into the crowd of students.
I'm not very sure if it was the day after all of this happened or on the same day but, we took a short walking field trip to the small shopping center up the street from the school and interviewed them with questions about what their life stories were about and what their american dream was.
How I won the Right Of The Streets Of Memphis
A writing exercise we did was we read Richard Wright's story titled "How I Won the Right to the Streets of Memphis", and what we had done was each table group got a small excerpt of the story and we had to act out that excerpt our selfs. I think we did this exercise so that we could be able to see how detail is always a super important key point to writing an amazing story, and being able to see how others may be able to interpret your story and how they think your characters may look in real life even if it were to be a fiction or non-fiction story.
Initial Story Ideas
Initially for this writing assignment I really wanted to write about one of my earliest memories as a child because I wanted to see how far into my life I could really look into and try to pull out as much detail as possible. I had thought about writing about a very special disneyland trip that I had taken with my family for my 5th or 6th birthday, I also thought about another amazing family trip where I got the chance to overcome my fear of heights while zip-lining in cancun. In the end I choose doing the sort about the Disneyland trip because I thought it'd be cool to try and write a story from so long ago.
Hero's Journey
Hero's Journey was an other exercise to help us improve our writing we used this as an outline or just more or less something for us to follow to try so that our stories were more structured. I personally did not use this kind of structure because I felt like my story didn't really fit into it and there was never really any challenges I faced during my story, but I will most definitely use it in the future for one of my stories.
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Shell Descriptions
More writing exercise's, this exercise was mainly focused on working on description, we did this for about an entire week. We got describe shells, we described them in groups and on our own, and the objective was to create similes about the shells and also try to describe them so well that people could guess what shell it was out of a huge group of shells. This really helped me improve my description, at first I thought it was really, really pointless but it actually really helped me make my writing way better then it was before. Although describing shells seemed very pointless and a waste of time at that moment, it really wasn't and I think I learned a lot more about description and describing things more before this assignment.
Shell Description Alexandra by Alexandra Molina on Scribd
Final Draft
Writing my Finial Draft was kind of hard because since I only really remember snippets of the trip some I was only 5-6 years old, I tried really hard to put in as much detail and describe every place I saw, as well as every emotion 6 year old Alexandra would have been feeling that day. This project felt like such a long process but it was literally just 2 weeks worth of writing, I went through multiple unfinished drafts that I like think everyone loved what I had written so far. Something that I thought was pretty cool about my story was that I incorporated some Spanish in there since my parents would speak to me in Spanish while I was at that age.
Golden Moment From Exhibition
A golden moment during exhibition was when people finally came into our exhibition and got the chance to listen to our narratives that we had really worked hard on. While I was sitting at one of the golden lines tables I had told the students that were visiting my table to read the stories and if the saw something that they really enjoyed or just a sentence that had really good description to write it down onto the huge paper cloth we had on the table, and it was great because all of the kids found a line that they really enjoyed and wrote it down, pretty quickly the papers started to fill up and we were left with many golden lines.