Saturday, March 28, 2009

Back to childhood

I just started to follow Mama Kat's Losin It blog. She's got a great way of writing! I'm enjoying it! I found that she's got a little writing prompt to do. So here it is:

You can go back to your childhood for one day. What day and age do you choose?

This is interesting because I've just done a writing lesson (a memoir) with my first graders. We are studying the past and the present - how things have changed. I figured it would help them understand the "past" if they took a "picture" from their past and wrote about the moment. In order to teach that, though I had to think of a moment from my past. I didn't have the picture to help me as it's in a storage unit (I hope!) in Palm Springs, and I'm in Germany....kind of far to go searching for a picture. But I remember this day or rather this moment.

"Check out my new camera!" I said to Sandra. I had just gotten a new Polaroid camera and was enjoying taking pictures with it. "Here, let me take your picture." I swung the picture back and forth until the picture popped out and showed it to Sandra.

"That's so cool!" she said. "I'll take one of you!"

"Let me see the picture!!" I exclaimed after Sandra took the Polaroid picture of me posing by the clothesline. It was summer and Sandra had come over to play for the afternoon.

"Sandra, go stand over there," I pointed to the garage, "and make a funny face." She did. After the minute or so it took for picture to show up, we were laughing at ourselves. I stood on my head and Sandra took a new picture. "It's actually funny when you turn the picture over as if I were standing," I said. We laughed some more.

This went on for ages - well, at least until the film ran out. We thought we were pretty cool models. We used the clothesline pole to help us sometimes, with our poses (I think we might have been good pole dancers had we just had the music!)

*Being ten years old, with a good friend and a Polaroid camera was fun. Looking back at those pictures today (or when I move back) I remember how much fun the world was. No fears and no embarrassment.

Now, I didn't write all of that for my students. I wrote a portion of it, and then I wrote a version that was fairly dull so that they could see the difference and try to go with a more excited memoir of their own. It's fun to go and look at the past - especially when it's good memories!

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