Desperate #SOL19

I am participating in the Two Writing Teachers Annual March Slice of Life Story Challenge.  
This year I decided to complete my slice of life challenge through the use of quickwrites.  By doing this, I hope to explore my own writing, identify problems my students may be experiencing with these quick bursts of writing, and show them authentic revisions in the writing process.

This week I have been writing "live" with my students and using that writing for my posts. In my ealirer quick writes, I knew the prompts. I had a little bit of time to sort through what I was going to write. When my students do quick writes, they don't get that luxury of knowing ahead of time.

Yesterday, I decided to not only write live, but write unaware of the prompt. Here is what we did.

I pulled a book from the shelf, and looked at how many pages were in it. I called on a student to give me number between one and the number of pages in the book. Then I did the same with the paragraph number and sentence number.  Finally, the word number.

And that word became our quick write.

Today's word was "desperate."  Isn't that a great word!  I wrote along with my students, and I felt that anxiety of not knowing what to write about and where this word would take me.

But today, I proudly share the writing from one of students.  This is from Raney!

Image from Pixaby

I was stranded on the streets, desperate for a home. I walked down every neighborhood just to find the right home. As I was was thinking about food, I look up to see a bright shiny gold and silver house that said, "Raney come on in." So I ran into the house to find, nothing but the streets, and flashing cars pass by me. Then I realized I knew I would never find a home. I would only live on a thick gray side walk.




This writing was done in six minutes with no time to edit or revise. This is raw. This is real. This is "desperation" at its best.