Little Stories to Tell - Book 1 (Kittle Stories to Tell)

Popularity Popularity Featured Price: Low to High Price: High to Low Avg. Snowman - Book Nr. Available for download now. Douglas , Chris S. Exantus Quatrains Apr 16, Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. My father has left me, my whole life, in a state of wonder.

Frankie was vague when I asked about the future of the little blue house. I spent a lot of time at the Mercury Public Library when I was kid. Frankie sent me there to borrow books by way of free babysitting. Miss Kittle was the head librarian, a buttoned-up brunette who, along with the rest of the staff, barely tolerated me.

Still, I loved the library. I especially loved plump, berry-scented Miss Kittle. A few weeks before we left for the desert, Miss Kittle surprised me by calling out my name when I walked through the library doors.

Giving Students the Right Kind of Writing Practice - Educational Leadership

Miss Kittle had never spoken directly to me before. I visit every summer. I miss the desert.

• Harvard Law Review: Volume 125, Number 1 - November 2011.
• Lap One: Swimming in Short Memoirs (One Week);
• Stories from the Teaching Life with Penny Kittle by The Teacher Learning Sessions on Apple Podcasts.
• Asking For It.
• Retirement Planning: Tools for Creating a Blueprint for Your Ideal Life.
• Gold Adornments and other stories - Patrician Press | Patrician Press?

Then she reached beneath the counter and drew out a large, heavy book. Oh no, I thought. Or paved roads for that matter. Santa Sophia was a tidy desert town consisting of mostly guarded, affluent communities.

But past the mission-style shopping malls, and beyond the fuchsia bougainvillea and the median beds of white aggregate and flowering cacti, and over the abandoned train tracks, thousands populated the thrice-foreclosed-upon Verdi Village mobile home development that bled out over two square miles of hard-baked, treeless earth. The original double-wide, pitch-roofed aluminum trailers were run-down, but at least they still had electricity and running water, unlike the second strata of mobile housing grown from the seeds of Airstream and Coachmen and Four Winds.

Past that, the vagabonds had erected a haphazard crust of shacks and shanties, shelter for economic refugees, the mentally ill, and bikers. Locals called the place Tin Town. In those dangerous narrows grew children who knew too much too young but, sadly, always seemed to learn too little too late.

It was hot as hell in Tin Town—it set the most records in the state for triple-digit temperatures. I can still smell the unwashed bodies and twice-fried sausage, cigarette smoke and cat shit; and I can hear the discontent like bad radio reception. But mostly I can feel it—the wind, constant through the San Gorgonio Pass, polishing the earth and nourishing the groves of wind turbines along the desert roads.

You can see those ribbons of straight white stalks from eight thousand feet up the mountain. The Mountain Story Trade Paperback Both of us, as we begin this week, open our own notebooks and model jotting notes about how Collins's words remind us of our own friendships, family memories, or favorite places. We list a few ideas and begin drafting out the story of one, writing in front of our students as they write in their notebooks. This few minutes of daily practice in finding ideas and writing about them increases the volume of ungraded writing practice, a key component in building student confidence.

Putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard daily is essential, regardless of the genre we're teaching. Our willingness to model our thinking as we draft in front of our students also helps them to understand the messiness of re-reading and revising. Writing teachers must write.

Their first responsibility is to show learners that writing is interesting, possible, and worthwhile. For this to occur, teachers must regularly model their own writing process. After several days of practice, we start small by asking students to select one idea and write a word memoir that focuses on two skills: It was already seven o'clock and the annual party had just started. My face was painted sugar-skull white.

Nicole C. Douglas

The backyard was purely lit with twinkling white lights hanging across the patio and swirling around the maple trees. The tables were filled with sweet Day-of-the-Dead treats: An altar stood alone in the center of the party. Pictures of our past loved ones were displayed.

• The Mountain Story | Book by Lori Lansens | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster?
• Entwicklungshilfe als Mittel zur Beschleunigung der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung (German Edition).
• Eternitys Mark.

Sugar skulls, tissue paper flowers and marigolds or flor de muerto scattered the tables. Instead of grieving their deaths, we spend our evening celebrating our loved ones. A scene is a moment in time. It most often includes three elements: Our students don't write an entire story during this week; they write one moment in a story.

We model this by having them study numerous mentor texts, and when it's time to draft, we support students by writing and thinking alongside them. A scene can be as short as half a page of writing, which allows us to narrow the focus of our teaching in studying mentor texts and working or conferencing with individual students.

The Mountain Story

Here's how Penny's student Sara began her scene:. The car ride was nauseating, trees stood tall around the road leading us to a long secluded driveway, everything seems still, the grass long but unmoving, the rocks simply existing, the signs lining the gray tar screaming "Correctional Facility" in bold, black letters, reminding me where I am and why, and as the building comes into view, I am still, still as the grey blocks before me, still as the few parked cars in the large lot, I feel sick again, the sight of towering metal fences protected by layers and layers of sharp barbed wire making me dizzy.

Looking to the heavy doors at the top of what seems to be countless concrete stairs, I become alive, I start moving, hoping my brother is in there doing the same thing. In a conference, Penny celebrated Sara's use of clear images and a strong narrator's voice. She recognized that this student was testing sentence boundaries by imitating an intentional run-on sentence from a mentor text in order to flood the reader with images. When asked about dialogue, Sara noted, "I didn't include it because there was nothing left to say.

When we listen to students, we understand what they know and how they are working to craft meaning, both in images and with punctuation. We want our students to understand that punctuation decisions move beyond correctness and often influence a reader's engagement with the text.

By The Teacher Learning Sessions

Next, we ask students to create a series of scenes that tell a story. We begin by studying the shape of stories. In doing so, we analyze a series of skills that build on what students learned in the first two laps. We have students notice how a scene can either slow down time or build momentum, and we note how dialogue reveals character through what is said—or not said.

As we point out in mini-lessons or conferences, writers use detail to direct the reader's focus. Careful word choice affects the narrator's voice. Lastly, we focus on how writers create compelling endings. We study how expert writers craft their stories. Studying an anchor text like Stephen King's "The Man in the Black Suit" helps our students emulate the moves good writers make. We don't give our students formulas for organizing their stories.

Throughout the teaching of this unit, we generally personalize our teaching through individual conferences to help students plan and shape their drafts. Sometimes, we reteach necessary skills to certain students. For example, consider how Penny subtly helped Sara keep going and creating. Sara was serious about developing this story of her brother's incarceration. At one point, she asked Penny, "Will you read this?

Snowman - Book Nr. 3 (Little Stories to Tell)

I don't know where to go next. Each detail of her recent visit to prison breathed tension. This was Sara's story, and we expected her to make decisions about her own work. Penny responded by saying: Your next move depends on the story you want to tell. You could flash back to scenes of the two of you growing up.

Or you could shift the focus to you and how his incarceration has impacted your first years in high school. Educators guide students toward independence when they focus their teaching on the deliberate progression of skills, coupled with an expectation that students will make their own decisions about the organization of their writing.

Sara became a stronger writer as she applied what she learned about scene writing in lap two to her complex story of a sibling relationship now strained by distance. We could see her becoming ready to take on that challenge. This fourth lap allows teachers to differentiate instruction. At this point in our unit, some of our students still struggled with crafting several effective scenes to tell a story. These students repeated lap three to gain the additional practice necessary to write effective stories.

Our more advanced writers moved on to writing stories told through the lens of multiple narrators—a level of complexity they never would have attempted in a classroom where students only write one narrative essay before moving on to the next genre.