Okay For Now is one of my favorite 2011 books! I have also ready The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt and that book is great also. Okay For Now is set in 1968 and is about a boy named Doug who moves to a new town. He doesn't know anyone in this new town and he doesn't have a great family life but he really is a nice kid. This book is all about how he handles living in a new town and his family dynamics.
I have read parts of Okay For Now with some of my older students to think about how the author writes. It's so important to read a lot in order to be a good writer. Mrs. Whelan, another hearing itinerant teacher who I work with, suggested we do an activity between our two blogs about reading and writing. We'll talk about Okay For Now and Doug's story a little bit later. For now, we want you to generate a list of territories - or a list of topics that you can write about, topics that you really own because you know what they are all about.
If we are going to do some writing, it's really important that we first have a list of territories - topics that we own because we really know them inside and out, they are ours.
Here's my list of writing territories:
It's a little bit hard to see, but hopefully you can see some big ideas that I could write about and get an idea of what Mrs. Whelan and I would like you to do! Your job now is to write your own list of writing territories! You can visit Mrs. Whelan's blog to see some samples of my students wrting territories and then make your own. Make sure you share your territories list in the comment section here or on The Hearing News Blog. Next week, we'll talk about narrowing down one of our territories to one small moment that we can write about!