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This is a website that allows students to create their own stories with pictures to accompany them, provided by themselves or by the community of this website. I want to use this to helps students craft stories that are from their life or based on something that happened to the students. I wanted to include an activity twich will appela to differnt types of students, which is why I want to give students a chance and give them the option to try something different.

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PowToons is a website that allows people to create cartoons. I want student to use this website to help them craft stories that come from their lives or are based on their own lives. I like to make sure that I am providing students with a variety of activities to practice their learning that appeal to their strengths and interests.

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Powtoon | Create Awesome Videos Yourself

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Powtoon gives you everything you need to easily make professional videos and presentations that your clients, colleagues, and friends will love! No design or tech skills are necessary - it's free, easy, and awesome!

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This was an idea that I thought about while I was thinking about connections, In this activity I want to helps students see the connections that they can make from the book. I want students to start off with the book at the center and create braces off of them detailing the types of connections that they can think about from the book. Then they keep adding on from each of the points until they cant think of any more. May make this a group activity and might consider using Coggle to make this more interactive

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Coggle is a collaborative mind-mapping tool that helps you make sense of complex things. Create unlimited mind maps and easily share them with friends and colleagues.

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This is a graphic organizer that will help students connect the text to other parts of their life. I know that it helps students if they have some way to keep their thoughts organized and put down on paper. It will also help them when they are trying to share parts of the relationship to others in the class.

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Connection lesson and Sentence starters.

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Connection lesson and Sentence starters.

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This is an article about an idea to help students with connecting the text to other things , like life. It is something that I think will help when I a trying to teach students how to help students see how important it is to connect the text to other things in their life. I want to make sure that students understand that these books can have an impact on how they think and what they view in the world. I also liked the sentence starters that could help students get started on how to ask what connect to text, self, and to the world. I know that having sentence starters helps students would help students get this concept.

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Reading comes alive when we recognize how the ideas in a text connect to our experiences and beliefs, events happening in the larger world, our understanding of history, and our knowledge of other texts. The Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self, Text-to-World strategy helps students develop the habit of making these connections as they read. When students are given a purpose for their reading, they are able to better comprehend and make meaning of the ideas in the text. You can use this strategy with any type of text, historical or literary, and with other media, such as film. It can be used at the beginning, middle, or end of the reading process to get students engaged with a text, to help students understand the text more deeply, or to evaluate students' understanding of the text.

1. Select a Text
This strategy works best with a text that raises universal themes that might resonate with students' own experiences and with material they have studied previously. Teachers often give students their own copy of the text so that they can mark it up, although this is not required.

2. Guide Students through Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self, Text-to-World
Theaccompanying handout to this strategy provides you with sample questions that you can give students to guide them through this activity. The questions in the directions are general, but you can make them specific to the material your class is studying. For example, you might ask students to connect what they read to specific texts or to events you have studied earlier in the school year.

3. Debrief
Students gain a deeper understanding of the text, of their classmates, and of the world around them when they have the opportunity to discuss their responses with peers. Students can share their responses with a partner (see theThink-Pair-Share teaching strategy), in small groups (see the Assigning Roles teaching strategy), or as part of a larger discussion (see the Fishbowl teaching strategy).

One Connection: If you have limited time, you can give students the option of writing about one connection they have found between the text and another text, their lives, or the larger world.

Mapping Connections: Social maps are a visual way of showing relationships between people, but they can also be used to show relationships between ideas and events. An extension of this activity would be to have students draw the connections they find between a text and other ideas, events, or experiences. Students can work on these maps in groups, noting the relationships among their responses.

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A teaching strategy to help students make connections between the ideas in readings, their own experiences and beliefs, and events in history and the world. Facing History offers teaching strategies that nurture students' literacy and critical thinking skills within a respectful classroom climate.

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This is a little graphic that I want to include to help students see the ways that we can connect the texts to other parts of our lives. This include personal relations, text relations, and world relations. This is important to think about since these it can effect how we view the world or ourselves, which is why I want to emphasize this in my lesson

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Once students have read the books, I want to split the students up by the books that they have read, then they can discuss the connections that they have made from the text to other parts of their lives. I will emphasize using the graphic organizer and the connection web activity that have talked about so they can show others these connections that they made. They might make more connections form this conversation and gain more insight into the story. I also hope to pull out some ideas that seem to reoccur and show students how this connects to the class as a whole.

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The expression of students is a way in which we can help students find ways to create text based on real events. I would like to offer this activity as a way for students to use the events or feelings that they have had in real life and use them to create a poem about their feelings about an event. I will have to refer the students back to some of the poems that we have read in this big idea topic.

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The Boy Who Invented TV: The Story of Philo Farnsworth

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The Boy Who Invented TV: The Story of Philo Farnsworth

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This is the actual story to Philo, the one who invented the television. We get to see how his idea came from when he was working in the field. Then from that idea, it grew into a project that he pursued and it eventually turned into something that people have used everyday. I want to use this for the creative students or the ones that like to dream. It would also be great or encouraging students to pursue their dreams and get them to be proactive in their learning. It is something that might motivate them to purse their ideas and cultivate their imaginations.

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Esoeranza was a girl that had a great life, she was the daughter of a wealthy landowner in Mexico. But after an accident with her father she needs to escape with her family from those that want to harm them. Escaping to America she has to adapt to new living conditions, now she must work for her family and try to get by in a difficult time, the great depression. It is like a reverse fairy tale story that the young girl comes into reality. I think that this story would connect not only to events but to other stories that students have read, like Cinderella. It is a great story to take a look at and read until the end.

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Promises to Keep: How Jackie Robinson Changed America

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Promises to Keep: How Jackie Robinson Changed America

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Jackie Robinson was a man who  changed baseball, he was a great athlete and baseball player. While many people know about him, we now get to see that story from the perspective of his daughter. Get to know the stories that weren't on the field, but from the perspective of a close member of his family. This story is of an actual event that I hope that students see some similarities between themselves and Jackie. I am sure that this would be a great way to help students make connections to actual people, and see that even heroes are people and they have their own lives that might paint them in a different life.

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This is the story of young Annmarie during the time that Nazi's invade Denmark. During this time, her parents help smuggle Jews past the Nazi's and get them to safety. As time goes on Annmarie notices a great deal of things that happen now that Germans have come into power, she learns how things have changed for other people and what they have to do now that her family is helping these persecuted refugees. All of this is told form the point of view of a young girl who is trying to understand a dangerous world. I felt that this is a good way to help students make connection to people that help them, like these people did. Or they could make connections to how certain people will help others even thought it will get them in trouble. In any case, I am sure that there are a few connections that I think that kids will be able to make from this story, where the kid is trying to understand their parents choices and actions.

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Deza Malone is a 12 year old girl living during the great depression. She and her family is trying to make things go their way while they dealing with the trying times. It doesn't help when Deza's family is starting to split up. Her father is going of to  find money for his family while her brother is going off on his own to make it big. It She also has personal problems with her teeth that cause her pain. It will be a challenge for her as she tried to survive this bad situation she is in. I wanted to include this book so that students can see how actual event could have effected a person during this time. I think connecting this book to real events could have happened is another way in which I can get students to relate this book to something that happened.

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When students are trying to make their own stories, I want to help them in telling their story, Especially with nonfiction characters, so I want to include this article with their lesson, so that they have an idea on how to represent their characters. This should help as an aid for students if they decide to craft a narrative in the activities that I have planned.

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Characters are the soul of what's come to be called creative nonfiction, an umbrella term that covers memoir, the personal essay and literary journalism, among others. But characters in nonfiction present special problems: While characters in fiction are often based on real people, there's still that screen. In nonfiction, by contrast, the writer is telling the reader: These people I'm bringing to you are real.

A lot has been written about characters and character when it comes to fiction. Many of the same techniques apply to nonfiction: Through detail, through gesture, through talk, through close understanding of whole lives before and after the scope of your story, you make your people vivid in your reader's head.

ENHANCING CHARACTERIZATION
When writing nonfiction, much of the work of characterization is done for you. The character has been made, characterization is complete, the family history is in place, the physical description is a given. But that doesn't make anything easier. The chore is merely different: doing justice to a person who you and many others have known, while also doing justice to the fact that you know that person in your own way, filtered through your own emotions, biases and experiences.

In The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeannette Walls, we don't meet her father right away. The first scene in the book gives us little Jeannette, age 3, cooking hot dogs for herself, life as normal in her nutty household, at least until she sets herself on fire. We meet her father, the redoubtable Rex Walls, when he comes to the hospital to visit her-she's been badly burned. He thinks the little girl should have been taken to the witch doctor who cured her older sister's scorpion sting. He threatens a doctor with a beating for saying that bandages are necessary and finally gets thrown out of the hospital by a guard. Then we see him again (and hear him, smell him, touch him, very nearly taste him):

A few days later, when I had been at the hospital for about six weeks, Dad appeared alone in the doorway of my room. He told me we were going to check out, Rex Walls-style.

"Are you sure this is okay?" I asked.

"You just trust your old man," Dad said.

He unhooked my right arm from the sling over my head. As he held me close, I breathed in his familiar smell of Vitalis, whiskey and cigarette smoke. It reminded me of home.

Dad hurried down the hall with me in his arms. A nurse yelled for us to stop, but Dad broke into a run. He pushed open an emergency-exit door and sprinted down the stairs and out to the street. Our car, a beat-up Plymouth we called the Blue Goose, was parked around the corner, the engine idling. Mom was up front, Lori and Brian in the back with Juju. Dad slid me across the seat next to Mom and took the wheel.

"You don't have to worry anymore, baby," Dad said. "You're safe now."

USING ACTION TO INFLUENCE CHARACTERIZATION
In the previous example, we see the man in action, but we see him from the little girl's point of view. She doesn't judge her old man-he's a hero, her knight in shining armor. Later, Walls will report from her writer's desk: "In my mind, Dad was perfect, although he did have what Mom called a little bit of a drinking situation."

But here, early in the narrative, it's all in the moment, all from a particular point of view. We see the hospital, but only as required to give the action a context, and only as the 3-year-old sees it. A nurse yells-that's our reality check-this guy is over the top. We burst out an emergency door, feel the air, hear the alarms going off without Walls having to say anything about these things. We get the name of the family car, the sense that it's not exactly a Mercedes, that they're not exactly Mercedes people. And off they go.

Rex is established, in fact all but literally burned into the reader's mind. We suspend our readerly judgment, adopt the child's point of view: She does seem safer. We're in a particular time and don't leave it. We're in a particular place. We're seeing things from a particular point of view. The mode is action, action, action, and it's effective.

The burned girl and her family are home only a short time before Dad gets it in his fiery head that the FBI is after them. And off they go in the middle of the night, traveling light, leaving behind all their memories, bills and belongings.

USING EXPOSITION TO PROVIDE A COMPLETE PORTRAIT
Now that we've seen her dangerous father in several scenes, Walls takes a paragraph to describe him in exposition:

Everybody said Dad was a genius. He could build or fix anything. One time when a neighbor's TV set broke, Dad opened the back and used a macaroni noodle to insulate some crossed wires. The neighbor couldn't get over it. He went around telling everyone in town that Dad sure knew how to use his noodle. Dad was an expert in math and physics and electricity. He read books on calculus and logarithmic algebra and loved what he called the poetry and symmetry of math. He told us about the magic qualities every number has and how numbers unlock the secrets of the universe. But Dad's main interest was energy: thermal energy, nuclear energy, solar energy, electrical energy and energy from the wind. He said there were so many untapped sources of energy in the world that it was ridiculous to be burning all that fossil fuel.

Walls is still working from the kid's point of view, trading in family stories. Of course, not everybody thought Rex Walls was a genius. The adult writer is standing back, withholding judgment, letting us readers come to our own conclusions, make our own judgments. Later in the memoir, the writer-at-her-desk will have more to say. Later in the memoir, she'll condemn her father in some ways, while loving him, missing him. But for now, in the early pages of the book, Walls is content to stay in the moment and put her wild father in front of us as he was.

Excerpted from , second edition © 2008 by BILL ROORBACH WITH KRISTEN KECKLER, with permission from Writer's Digest Books.

This article appeared in the May/June issue of Writer's Digest Click here to order your copy in print . If you prefer a digital download of the issue, click here. .

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Craft True-to-Life Nonfiction Characters | WritersDigest.com

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Many of the same techniques for writing characters in fiction apply to nonfiction: Through detail, through gesture, through talk, through close understanding of whole lives before and after the scope of your story, you make your people vivid in your reader's head. by Bill Roorbach with Kristen Keckler

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This is a story about a young teen named Brian. He was flying on a plane going into Canada when his pilot suddenly suffers a heart attack. Brain survives the crash but now is stranded in the Canadian wilderness. Now he needs to survive on his own, armed with the hatchet he just received before the plane crashed, he needs to find a way to get help before winter sets in and he stranded. I think that this would be a good connection book for those students who have lived in the wilderness or have gone camping with their family. They could see some of the similarities to their own lives in the story. Of course, they could also connect it to times when they were lost and were trying to find out where they are.