Buffalo for Breakfast

I ran into the parent of a former student yesterday. "What year is Amelia now?" I asked.

"A freshman in college!" her mother replied, and the two of us marveled at how quickly the time has passed.

This morning I recalled that conversation, and I thought back to 2015 when Amelia was in my class, mentally cataloging the consistencies and differences between then and now. We did do the 100 Day Writing Challenge, but it was housed on our old LMS, Blackboard, which we no longer have access to. 

For the umpteenth time, I felt a pang of regret for all that lost writing, and I reminisced about the early days of the online writing community that my friend Leah and I created.

The technology is certainly better now than it was in 2006 when we started, but the structure of kids writing and replying to each other is still in place in my class today. I laughed when I remembered one of our earliest assignments, a photograph that Leah found of a cowboy drinking coffee across a kitchen table from an enormous bison who was in turn eating out of a giant tin pan. We called it "Buffalo for Breakfast" and asked the students to imagine what was going on and write about it.

I had woken up a little uncertain about the lesson plan I had prepared for today. My classes are working on writing fiction, and they have been diagramming simple plots of children's books and animated short films to see how they work. I wanted them to be in collaborative groups, and I had planned a jigsaw activity with another short film. But the thought of that guy and his bison changed my mind. Instead, I found that old photo and had the young writers work together to brainstorm the plot of a children's story about it, using the plot diagram to plan instead of analyze.

It ended up being a fun and productive formative activity: the kids were creative and silly, and I was able to see from their work which elements of plot were still a bit confusing (Hello, inciting event and resolution supporting the theme!). So often, as teachers, we move on from assignments and activities when they become a bit dated or stale, but today I remembered that there is a difference between old and vintage, and sometimes it's worth a look back into the archives to retrieve some lost treasures.