Does anyone else find it hard to come up with clever titles for their posts?

As I mentioned in my last post, I am working with my English 9 students on strengthening their writing skills. I am using a program called "6 traits". The idea is that there are 6 basic traits of good writing, and if you work on each trait individually, you can improve your writing. The 6 traits, if you're interested, are: voice, sentence fluency, conventions (meaning grammar, spelling etc), word choice, ideas and content, and organization. Right now, we are working on voice. I had them listen to some very different styles of music and analyze the lyrics, then read them a few different passages that are full of voice and discussed them. Then I gave them an assignment to write their own piece of writing, they could choose a poem, song lyrics or paragraph, using their 'voice' as much as possible. I was surprised how many of them came up to me and said "I don't get how to do this." So this weekend, I decided to write my own passage and try to make it full of voice. It was actually harder than I thought! I eventually decided to write about my kids ~ I had suggested to the students that they write about something very personal ~ and just write as though someone asked me to describe them. I was actually pretty pleased with the results, and here they are!

I have two kids, Brodie and Chloe. Brodie, also known as “the big one” when I’m in a hurry and I can’t remember his name ~ hey, I’m a teacher, I have a ton of names to remember ~ is eight and a half, the size of a twelve year old, with the attitude of a fourteen year old. He is super fun to hang out with; he likes soccer, snowboarding, biking and swimming, to name a few things. We have air-hockey tournaments after dinner, the best of seven. He always gets to be the Canucks, though, and I get stuck being stupid Toronto or Edmonton. Yuck. He usually wins, too. Brodie is way to smart for my own good, and likes to play tricks. On Valentine’s Day, I left my Facebook profile open, and he changed my status to “is In Love”, with capital letters. Embarrassing! My friends left messages on my wall like “Aw, how sweet!” I don’t even know how he knew how to do that. Monkey. My other monkey, I mean kid, is Chloe. She’s “the little one.” She is two and a half, the size of a one and a half year old, with the attitude of a twenty-year old. She thinks she rules the roost. And she kind of does, actually. She is so incredibly cute that it is nearly impossible to say no to her. “Mom, can I have candy for breakfast?” Bats amazingly long eyelashes and smiles with full-on dimples. “Um, ok.” She is also very smart, and I’m sure will be messing with my Facebook profile as soon as she figures out how. So, those are my babies, challenging but loveable. I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

Comments

[foolery]

I've never taken a writing class -- sounds hard. Also, I'm afraid I'll find out I suck and I'll quit. But seriously, I would like to learn a little bit about what it is I do with half of my free time. Hard enough to imagine DOING it -- I can't imagine TEACHING it!