I hope everyone had a great weekend! I went to visit my daughter and her new puppy, and I have the little bite marks to prove it :)

Today we focused on paragraphing (organization of writing) and the strategies of using Flashforward and Flashback for elaboration.

For paragraphing, students learned the acronym of P.A.T.S as a reminder of when to indent. Everyone should have this in their notes. If you were absent, paragraph indentation is when there is a change of PLACE, a change in ACTION, a change in TIME, and a change in SPEAKER. Students went back into their narratives and wrote the paragraph symbol to indicate a new paragraph.

We discussed how flashbacks we have read added meaning to a narrative, and I would like everyone to have a flashback (a past true event) in their story. Another way to elaborate is with a flashforward, and this is when a narrator imagines an event (they are essentially daydreaming). The event has to be realistic and occurs at a time in the story where the narrator does not know the outcome. For example, in the mentor text the narrator doesn't know whether his kitty will live or die. He states, "I imagined I was 17 and brought the cat to Dr. Milk's..." This about how you daydream or create events in your mind when you are not sure how a problem will be resolved.

H/W: Your narrative should have a flashback and a flashforward. This is the narrative you chose as your piece to take through the writing process. Also, your narrative should be marked up with the paragraph symbol (like a backwards 'P') in the places where you should have started a paragraph but didn't. Students had time to work on this in class.

Enjoy this beautiful day!