Let me tell you something about my first week of teaching fourth grade. This week I read to my fourth graders a few chapters from Esme Caudill's Sing A Song of Tuna Fish. Each detailed chapter begins with "Let me tell you something about...". I asked my students to use this prompt to share something about themselves that they would like for me and/or their classmates to know. The something could be about a person close to them, a memory, their favorite pastime. What they produced was quite telling. Just the topic each child chose told volumes about their personality: my dad, how I learned to skateboard better, our family trip, the cat my mom gave away without telling me, Paris, potatoes. Yes, one child wrote about her summer trip to Paris and how confusing it was not to speak the language and how there were language booths to visit to get translations and another child wrote about his favorite food "ever" and drew brown ovals all over the page. I was really impressed by two of my young writers. One effectively used similes and they both were skilled at "exploding the moment" (a Barry Lane term).
I bought 23 white ten-cent folders at H-E-B and had them label them as their Writing Portfolios and decorate them. We'll monitor progress over the year and choose which pieces we'll polish with the writing process. My new colleague also shared Six-Word Memoirs with me. See the following website for some student samples: http://www.smithmag.net/sixwordbook/sixword-storybook/. This activity was a lot of fun. If you have trouble turning the page, click at the very bottom and drag. The teeny-tiny very bottom of the right page. It's tricky.

My six-word attempt:
Teaching writing delivers me from monotony.