From Stories to Essays

Before we can begin crafting our essays, students use a variety of strategies to "grow" ideas. Today they reviewed stories written at the beginning of the year, read them to partners, then asked each other questions like:

• What does this tell you about yourself?
• What does this make you realize?
• What did you want your audience to know about this?

These types of questions help us to get to the deeper meaning of our writing. Hopefully one of these ideas will progress into a thesis for an essay!