Thanks to Anne at Read, Write, Talk! She turned me on to this book, and a great activity for my seventh graders came from it! We are finishing up our Unit of Inquiry on peer relations, for which The Outsiders is our class novel. Using the book I Can't Keep My Own Secrets as a base, I developed a short presentation for my Smartboard about expressing one's thoughts about peers and friendships in just six words. First, we looked at a number of examples from the book and discussed what we were able to learn about each person from what he or she wrote. It's amazing how much you can glean from just a half dozen words. Then, we talked about what makes the examples we looked at so strong: Honesty...Thoughtfulness...Character...Clarity...Strong Words.
Next, I had the students draw a box in their spirals, and in that box, they wrote all kinds of thoughts about themselves and their peer relationships. Finally, they whittled the thoughts down to six words. They typed up their memoirs using what they felt were appropriate fonts and colors, etc., and printed them out. I allowed them to be anonymous if they wanted to, or they could put their names on their pieces. Naturally, this being 7th grade, most of the kids just put their names on the back.
Here are some results. I was blown away by how thoughtful some of these were.
There were countless others that I could have posted here. I'm making a Voicethread of the lesson and results.