Unit One: Exploring the Inner Self - Continued (1.2)

Students Will: Identify and apply a variety of appropriate reading strategies to make sense of a variety of print texts, to understand the human experience, and to develop ideas in written/oral responses.

Task: Think of a place that is meaningful to you. This may be a place where you felt particularly happy or safe or a place that is deeply familiar or beautiful. Then visit the following Web sites that contain powerful images of landscape and place. Look carefully at these pictures for several minutes each, taking notes of the images seen and the feelings they evoke based on your own personal experiences. Notice the colors, weather, the particular landscape, and the light and the focus of the painting.  In your notes, answer the following question: How do these elements work to contribute to the mood or emotional feeling of the painting? Answer this for each site visited.

Sites: http://www.happyshadows.com/okeeffe/redhills_and_pedernal.jpg

http://www.happyshadows.com/okeeffe/New_York_Night-1928-1929.jpg

http://metalab.unc.edu/wm/paint/auth/hopper/street/hopper.gas.jpg

http://www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pimage?55314+0+0+homerwc

http://www.columbia.edu/~jns16/monet_html/monet.html

http://metalab.unc.edu/wm/paint/auth/monet/waterlilies/monet.wl-green.jpg

After visiting these sites, list ideas that came to mind about the places you remember from your life. Be certain to include physical details, emotional responses to the place, and events that have taken place there. Review the concept of "showing not telling" where a writer uses words to paint pictures that "show" instead of just using words that "tell" what the writer is trying to convey to his/her audience. Think about how you can make your readers feel an emotion rather than just observe it.

Then choose one of the places that you have taken notes about from your own experiences and write a personal essay or narrative based on the notes taken. The writing should be at least 3 ^1/2 pages in length. Be certain to include vivid details to make your writing descriptive. Remember the focus of personal expressive writing is to share a personal experience and the significance of it with your audience, causing them to think about their own life experiences or share with them a lesson you have learned. This writing should be typed and double spaced with a title, introduction, body paragraphs and conclusion.

Once the writing is complete, have a friend/parent/teacher revise or conference with you about the papers strengths and weaknesses and then produce a revised draft that is free of grammatical, mechanical and punctuation errors that is suited for an appropriate audience and is focused on your purpose of personal expressive writing.

Your writing will be scored according to the holistic scoring guide for Kentucky Writing Assessment.