Two things: first, because of our Snow Day and because I made our Wednesday asynchronous and online, I will collect Writer's Notebooks for this week (2 February 2022) and next week (7 February 2022) on Wednesday, 9 February 2022.

Second: Read this short excerpt, available by clicking on this link, from the flash non-fiction collection In-Short. This is the same collection that last week's in-class writing "Around the Corner" came from. I highly recommend it. Read the excerpt entitled "Falling Stars". You are welcome to read the other one "Three Yards" but my focus is on "Falling Stars". For today's in-class writing, part of your Writer's Notebook, write for about 7 minutes about a best friendship. You might write about it as a memoir. You might write about it as fictional. It all depends on where you think you are going with your writing in our class. Whichever you choose, consider how you will write it as Young Adult. Keep in mind the characteristics of the genre we talked about in last week's class to think about things like voice, tone, character, perspective, conflict, etc. 

Enjoy! 

NOTE: As this is an asynchronous assignment, you need to have this and all of the other posts from this week completed by class time on Monday, 7 February 2022.

The second post for our online/asynchronous class is about the listening assigned for Wednesday, 2 February 2022. You can access all of the Moth Story Hour stories from our syllabus on our class website. 

For this reading journal, please post no more than 300 words (because it is an online post). As you post, please consider not just the three stories I asked you to listen to from The Moth but think about the two stories from Monday's Snow Day cancellation. While "7th Grade" and "The Secret Letter" are specifically written for and, in the case of "Letter" written by, Young Adults, the other pieces are written for adult readers/audiences.And yet all of them work or could work as young adult. 

For this post, please  respond to this prompt using all five of the readings/listenings from this week: What makes something "young" and "adult"?  Is there a spectrum? If so, where to the stories we looked at this week fall? As you answer, consider the characteristics of YA that we talked about in class last week from the readings for Wednesday's class. 

NOTE: As this is an asynchronous assignment, you need to have this and all of the other posts from this week completed by class time on Monday, 7 February 2022.

This was the reading we would have discussed in class on Monday 31 January 2022. Use this space to post your reading journal for this class. If you've already written your journal, no need to edit, simple cut and paste by clicking on the "comments" button at the top below the title of this post. 

If you haven't already written it, use this space to post a 300 word version of your reading journal. Remember that the "generic" question to try to answer for any reading journal is, as follows (this appears on the Reading Journal assignment page for our class as well): what is this author trying to do, and what do you learn about the overall genre from reading this ?