Not too much to report for the week except hard work. That's right: hard work! That's exactly what you guys did this week. 

You worked hard at: 

• Analyzing the Gary Provost mentor text
• Crafting your own GP inspired paragraph (and man, were there some good ones)
• Creating additional paragraphs independently
• Practicing peer review
• Revising a paragraph for detail, description, and varied sentence structure

Coming up this week: finishing up this Timeline Writing Project and taking another crack at the STAR test. (Oh, and maybe some snow). ;) 

What a great week back! 

This week we hit the re-set button and geared up to do some reflective writing. We started chipping away at the Your Year in Review timeline project, and completed our first two paragraphs. 

We used this mentor text by George Saunders to kick things off. 

I've reminded you over and over why we're doing this: to practice writing (remember basketball or instrument analogies) and to nudge our writing toward a more mature style. Many of you are remarking on how you feel more comfortable writing for longer periods of time, how your development and description has improved, and for a few of you, how you've learned to make your stories and experiences "come alive." Wow! I'll take that as a win. 

Stay the course, kids. You're doing great. 

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It's a new semester and a new year! 

But before we're completely out with the old, in with the new, let's reflect back...

Your task for this next week or so will be to model from Slate's The Year of Good Things and create your own. You will be responsible for accounting for one event for every month that made you "grateful, optimistic, inspired, [or] awed".

You may, of course, make this your own and write about your own life in whatever ways it makes sense to you. I am hoping and encouraging you to focus on the good in your life. 

It ought to be a pretty neat way to kick of the semester...let's do it!

HERE is your task sheet. 

HERE is your mentor text.