The Absolutely True Diary of Me

The major final assessment that I have created for this unit has been for the students to create their own Absolutely True Diary, writing a short narrative of an event that has happened in their own lives and illustrating it similar to Junior’s style. Based on how the Poetry Anthologies came together, I realized that when designing the final project for this unit, I needed to include a lot more scaffolding and to design rubrics and checklists to help students better understand the steps they needed to complete along the way.

Along with the first assignment sheet, students all also got a copy of this checklist:

Both of these were cut to be able to fit into their English notebooks. I had the students glue these in to their notebooks as entries into their Table of Contents. As we have been completing the smaller in class writing assignments along the way, students have been able to write in due dates and check off the assignments that they have already completed.

To view some samples of students’ work so far on this assignment, please see the Student Work Samples page in this section.

Other Assignments

Along with our major final assignment, students have been participating in structure class discussions (such as Socratic Seminars), and completing in class, low-stakes writing assignments. Because our final assignment is more narrative and creative writing, I have been adding in more low-stakes literary analysis assignments to give the students more practice in this. Generally, on Mindful Reading days, students are asked to complete a short literary analysis assignment (usually writing a paragraph based on a quote they chose from the reading) that is based on whatever they were supposed to read during the Mindful Reading time.