Sunday, October 21, 2007

Literary Success

They did it! Fourth graders pulled together a fairly nice literary magazine in just two weeks. They began that period with no real knowledge of what a literary magazine is and finished by publishing one. Pretty impressive, on the whole.
Here are some pictures from the work Tree did with them during the first week. They did a lot of thinking about what makes a collection and why people collect various things.

Later they did a lot of brainstorming and reflecting about literary magazines.

Then, they looked at bunches of works of art and thought about the emotions they evoked.

All of this served to get them ready for the process of choosing texts and artwork and laying out our literary magazine.


I'm fascinated, as usual, to see their thinking. Our magazine included fifteen texts written by students from second through fourth grades. There are about twenty pieces of artwork in it by students from kindergarten through fourth grade.

The students who worked on the magazine wanted to spend time writing for it. One of our goals was for the magazine to give students a new audience for their writing. I think some of them are starting to see that. We hope to create another edition in the spring and I think it will be exciting to see how many students want to submit work after seeing this edition.

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