Welcome to what will likely be our final unit of the year! I struggled to think of something that would be easy for students and parents in a home-school scenario, but also interesting and exciting, with at least a side dish of already-established ELA skills to practice. I decided on journaling!

So much of what we know about history, we learned through the journals and primary documents created by the normal people who struggled through difficult times. We are in the midst of a historically difficult time in our country.

We're going to do our part to document our feelings and experiences just like any other stalwart group of pioneers have done at any other time in our country's history.
Picture
We may be walking a dark, narrow path right now, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. (Or maybe I just took this cool picture hiking at Panama Rocks last year... spoiler alert: I was WAY too fat to fit through this gap.)

Journal Mini Lesson 1: Narrative Voice

Monday, 4/20/2020
A writer’s narrative voice basically means you can tell who is writing based on how the text sounds.

Does it sound like two teenage friends talking? Does it sound like a scientist giving a lecture? Does it sound like a mom nagging her son? Very small changes make the difference between sounding like you, and sounding like a robot. When you go to Scholastic's website, it sounds and feels like an education corporation trying to sell you educational products. All the text on my website, I write myself, and I create all the resources, and the pictures are of my actual classroom, in which I actually teach.

Your writing should sound authentically "you." [If you're me, that means including the word "turd" in your COVID journal.

Journal Mini Lesson 2: Diary of Anne Frank

Monday, 4/27/2020
As we continue to create our own COVID-19 journals, we'll take advice from arguably the most famous historical journal of all time: The Diary of Anne Frank. I've included a digital copy of the entire book linked to the image to the right. During this lesson, students will choose three entries to summarize through a Google Form (the Google Form had by far the highest completion rate last week, so I'll use it again.

Once students have read and summarized three of the entries from an actual journal, they'll write three, new posts of their own.

Choose any three entries, and submit three responses to the Form.

Journal Mini Lesson 3: News vs. Experience

Monday, 5/4/2020
Most news covers events we don't experience, because most events happen on a small scale, to specific people, or a specific family, or house, or pet, or city. We hear about, watch, and read about things that happen far away, usually to people we don't know. What makes this event different is that we all experience it together. Last week, we read a diary [journal] from an author our age from a different historic event.  This week, we'll broaden our understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic by comparing our experiences with the news coverage of the event.

Students will watch 10-15 minutes of news coverage from any news source they choose. (I've linked a bipartisan and international variety of links to the right, but they're not limited to those options.) They will then complete a Google Doc graphic organizer about the news coverage, and throughout the week, add three entries to their journals, hopefully including this new, broader context to the events they experience in their daily life.

My bet is that whatever news source students choose, whether left, or right leaning, they won't capture the actual experience of boredom, Netflix, videogames, annoyance with parents and teachers, and talking to cats and dogs in the absence of friends and teachers.
I decided the best way to make sure that there was NO BIAS to the news coverage link I offered was to just do a Youtube serach for "COVID news." The image above will take you to a youtube search, and you're free to select any news video that piques your interest. Or watch the news with your parents, or if your phone is like mine, swipe left from the home screen and a bunch of news shows up. Pick something COVID related to read.

Final Journal Mini Lesson: Legacy

Monday, 5/11/2020
This experience will be a defining moment in our lives. Some families pulled together. Some couples broke apart. Some students and teachers rose to the occasion and learned despite the hardship. Some didn't. 

We will all definitely tell stories of the COVID-19 quarantine into our old age. (I realized that in my final year of teaching, sometime around 2040, the student teacher I might be paired with hasn't even been born yet. The realization made me feel somehow both very  young, and incredibly old.)

This week's assignment is to write the story of your own quarantine from the perspective of yourself as a grandparent. What will you tell your grandchildren about COVID-19?

This week, we're going to experiment with perspective. First, we'll interview a parent, guardian, grandparent, or other "old" that we know about their experience with COVID-19. Then, we'll attempt to tell the story of COVID-19 from the perspective of ourselves 40 years in the future.

COVID-19 Journal Project

With everyone struggling to find new software to use to interact with students, and sending home workbooks, and technology that might have hiccups, and cumbersome copying, and collating, and distributing thick, confusing packets, in ELA, we're keeping it simple! Historical journals were just written on a pad of paper. That's all our kids need to do. If they have the internet, then keeping a journal as a Googledoc is possible, but not necessary. Documenting history is what matters.

Journal Description

Students will keep a COVID-19 journal (15-20 minutes of writing, three times weekly.) These journals should use all the writing skills we've already practiced, but no one needs to learn anything new to keep up, Students should share what they think, how they feel, who they still see, who they miss, and anything else that captures what it's like to be an 8th grader enduring this pandemic.

Success Skills

Intentionally organize and write a narrative text.
[W8.3a, W8.3b, W8.3c, W8.3d, W8.3e]
Choose compelling and insightful evidence.
[SL 8.5, W 8.4, W 8.6, W 8.8, W 8.10]
Produce and revise clear writing that is free of errors.
[W8.4, W8.5, W8.6]

Journal Materials

Journal Informational Slides

Click the image to the left to learn about what a journal is, and for the purposes of our assignment, what it isn't. As usual, you'll read some examples and some non-examples of how a journal should sound. Todas las palabras son en Ingles y Easpanol.
Links to 16 historic diaries and journals.
Historic diaries and journals searchable by state, historical period, gender, etc. Includes pictures of the actual diaries!
Shares excerpts from ten meaningful, historic diaries.
Includes excerpts from twelve famous historical figures specific to WW2. Includes historical context to help understanding.

Examples of Famous / Historic Journals

To truly capture the importance of journaling, we need to look to the past. Click the link to the left to read some amazing examples of the journals from history. These people took it upon themselves to document their own experiences, and in doing so, they literally wrote the pages of history.

Karpie's Journal Exemplars

Because no in-person teaching can take place, I took the liberty to create an example of a week's worth of journal entries. I created them both digitally, but students can write them wherever is convenient. They include the time I spent working. They're pretty short, and intentionally disorganized, as I'd expect student journals to be. These aren't beautifully finished essays. They're journals. They'll include spelling errors. They won't be organized by my students. They'll be organized by historians fifty years from now when they look back at our "archaic" Google Classroom technology, which was the best we could muster in these technology-impaired times.

Journal Project Assignment

The journal project itself is easy. Students will use this document, or loose-leaf paper, or anything else that's easy to come by at home, to write three journal entries each week. Each entry should take 15-20 minutes, be about a page long, and include a date and title.

When in doubt, see Karpie's Exemplar Journal.

Writing Tools

The goal of every successful ELA classroom is to help students develop into the best possible writers that they can become. The tools to the left are what we use in my classroom to help students on the road to above grade level writing and beyond. 

Let's document history together using the writing skills we've practiced all year long!
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