Sidewalk Chalk to "Get the Wiggles Out"

Wow!  Can't believe the semester is over!  We finished The Outsiders, wrote an essay about whether or not it should be considered a classic, and I  needed something light and fun to wind up the semester.  My honors classes conduced mock trials instead of the essay. Anyhow,  I decided to revisit the six-word memoir.  My students wrote one about themselves at the beginning of the year.  It's a great way to teach students the importance of word choice.  It's also not as easy as it sounds.  As Mark Twain once said,“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” We had a nice discussion about this quote!  Students had to select a character from the novel and write a six-word memoir as that character.  After publishing them to our classroom blog, I grabbed a bucked of colored chalk and took them outside to the quad where they were asked to write their memoirs.  Of course, I made sure to spell out the expectations beforehand.  If you teach middle school you will know that I said things like: "Don't write anything inappropriate on the sidewalk and don't attack each other with chalk ."  Everything went flawlessly.

When we came back to class, I asked them, "Why do you think I took you outside and had you write your memoir on the sidewalk?"  One student said, "So that other people can read what we wrote?"  I responded that indeed, that was one of the reasons.  However, the second student captured it best when he said, "To help us get our wiggles out!"  Yep!  

However, it was pretty cool when I saw other students walking around reading them at lunch. Every student at our school has read the book, so they were able to appreciate what they were reading. If you haven't tried this yet, I recommend it!