Personal Essays Hanging Around Town

Our second published pieces of the year - our personal essays - are now up around town! You'll find a breakdown of whose pieces are hanging where below.

Each essayist chose a goal for the unit from three of the big focuses we had as a class: writing a strong introduction, organizing in paragraphs, or elaborating our essays by including anecdotes and examples to support our ideas. While each essayist had one goal in particular, you'll find evidence of all three goals in each of the pieces you read.

We used mentor texts (published essays) to help us write strong introductions and conclusions, sometimes mimicking the phrasing or craft moves (e.g. making an interesting comparison or including our experiences with our topic) that the mentor texts used in their introductions and conclusions. Using mentor texts in this way helps push us to try new things as writers. We also studied anecdotes in mentor texts and noticed that many of the craft moves we learned in personal narrative (like, dialogue, inner thought, and tiny actions) can still be used in our essays to support our thesis idea.

At the end of our unit, we wrote six word essays, inspired by Ernest Hemingway's six word memoir. This required us to synthesize our essay; after several weeks of elaborating, we had to get down to the heart of what we were trying to say across many paragraphs, and sometimes pages, and say it in just six words. This work is more challenging than it first appears! You can find our six word essays hanging outside of Room 101.

Here's where you can find our pieces (by the end of the year, we'll all have been shared in each place, but we will have some repeats of where you'll find our piece along the way):

Tavolo - Will, Caroline, Evan, Lauren, Scarlett, RJ, Ryan, Eva, Jackson, Matt, Antonio, and Emma

River Road Books - Vivian, Alex, Patrick, and Ben

Fairwinds - Georgia, Megan, Dylan, Annie, and Serafina

Published Personal Essays Around Fair Haven

We're excited to share that our personal essays have been hung around town! Thanks to Sal, Ellie, Maddie, and their families for helping to hang these pieces.

Each hanging piece also has a QR code in front of it. The QR codes are the black and white images that can be scanned with a smartphone (there are free apps to scan them). Once the QR code is scanned, you'll be sent to a link that will allow you to listen to the class read our six word essays.

Here's a breakdown of whose pieces are where:

Tavolo - Patrick, Harry, Sophie, Jack M., Sal, Megan, Harris, Lily, Lucas, Christina M., Maisy, Braiden, Quinn, Chrisina U., and James

Fairwinds - Ellie, Caroline, and Connor

River Road Books - Maddie, Jack S., Maia, and Marcus

We're so thankful to these Fair Haven businesses for allowing us the space to share our writing!