Zoom In, Zoom Out
One of the joys of being a teacher is walking with a student one-on-one through daily life. Sometimes in the general classroom setting, it is difficult to really get to know students one-on-one: what they like to do, what their family dynamic is like, their sense of humor, or just the experiences that make he/she who they are. So, it is important that ELA teachers have some carved out, intentional time to get to know their students personally. Narrative Writing is one of the easiest ways to do this.
This quarter, my student and I are reading Serafina and the Black Cloak by Robert Beatty. In this book, the author uses Southern idioms and dialect to characterize his North Carolina family mysteriously hidden in the Biltmore mansion. I explained to my student that dialect helps bring characters and situations to life as it marks a specific person or place in time. I love Beatty’s use of dialect as a model, so we decided to use Serafina and her memories as a mentor text for this prompt.
Prompt: Pick a specific place and time in your life where you experienced a form of dialect. Recall a memory from this place and time and write a short story using several expressions or words to help develop the voice of your story.
The first thing I had my student do was pick a specific place or perhaps person in their life with distinct dialect. Because we are located in the South, she chose her quintessential Southern grandparents. Next, we made a 10 bullet list of phrases or words that her grandparents use. Finally, we started writing.
With Narrative Writing, I usually put the common narrative arc on the board. Every story must follow the arc, even if it is a seemingly insignificant moment.
As my student wrote, I let her tell the story as freely as she wanted to, writing beside her, asking her prompting questions that would allow her to string the events together. I did not, repeat did not, stop her train of thought. Even if it was only sentences like: “This happened next, and this happened next, and this happened next,” we just left it.
Thus begins, the Writer’s Workshop model. I am not the expert in all things Writer’s Workshop, but there are some tools that I find extremely helpful in middle school and high school writing. Kelly Gallagher has many a wise word on this for the classroom, if you would like to learn more.
In this post, I am going to zone in on one technique I employed called “Zoom In, Zoom Out.”
My student brought her story back the next day, and we went through each sentence together working through the technique of “Zooming In.” She had mostly composed a “Zoomed Out” story, giving the big picture of her event at Grandma’s. But she had left out, what I like to call, the “ooey-gooey details” of the story. These are the things that if we used our metaphorical “binoculars” we could see in the story.
As we went through her story, we asked these questions at the end of each sentence:
What did it sound like?
What did it feel like?
What did you hear?
Who was it?
What did they say?
What was going on in your mind?
What was going on in their mind?
We added and subtracted her sentences, scratching and marking it up. I let her talk aloud while I scribed for her, so she could get all her thoughts down. Until it looked like this:
When she felt satisfied with our additions, we typed up her story, still making changes, and added it to her writing portfolio.
Here is her final draft:
This story is perhaps one of my favorites I have ever read. I can hear her Grandmother’s laughter, the smell of the pizza in the oven, and the exhilaration of running down the hallways of the big house.
I hope this technique is helpful for your classroom as well. It is one of my favorite things to do in mine!
