The winter holidays often bring stories to the table. I think this is the perfect time of year to encourage middle graders to capture their family stories. We can draw parents into reminiscing about growing up, encourage grandparents to tell how they or their grandparents migrated to find their own homes, or how they fell in love, created their families, and chose a variety of holidays to celebrate. We can ask about childhood memories that capture a snapshot of history from a personal perspective. In doing so, we’re encouraging middle graders to gain perspective into the struggles and successes that built their communities and families.
My own kids, who were adopted, have a wide range of emotions about these assignments and they embrace these as part of their stories. I love hearing how they hold the stories coming out of their legacies. One of my daughters has two Ancestry trees; her adopted family tree and her birth family tree. A son wants to learn more about his ancestors who were poor farmers from another country. He’s visited the land of his birth. And he was also close to his adopted grandparents and wants to share their stories. Both of my daughters like to share stories of the relationships they have with birth and adopted siblings and parents.
In reality, most of our stories usually only go back one or two generations before we lose sight of why ancestors left their native countries and how they traveled across the country we now live in. I can trace my family back to the Revolution on my maternal side, but I only know my father’s grandfather was a lumberjack buried in the Northwest. I don’t know how or why my Irish ancestors came to the US on that side of the family. That helps me realize that my children’s responses to family histories is often complicated but it’s also rich. Asking a classroom full of diverse kids means some will balk at telling stories because they’re not traditional, or they’re sad, or confusing. How do we tell stories of leaving a country we love while fearing persecution or poverty? What happens when the parents who raised us have no choice but to send us away? Even when we stay together and remain in the land of our birth, we have stories that should be love-filled but also might include frightening, sad, or lonely events that no one wants to talk about.
I sent myself down a rabbit hole of imagining forgotten stories and how kids can fill in lost histories. My search also focused on the need to talk openly about emotions and how we respond to our own stories. What writing prompts can we offer to bring out these stories? What can we offer kids who don’t feel they have sharable memories?
Memoirist and publisher of She Writes Press Brooke Warner focuses on great guidance for finding and sharing memories. While we think of memoir as truth telling, we also recognize that telling a family story doesn’t always mean others see events in the same way we do. Teaching kids to write personal stories means we need our writers to understand that our stories tell our own emotional truth and two family members might not see the story in the same way. We might tell kids that we interpret meaningful moments in the ways they impact us. That is our truth. Warner focuses on this important distinction when she says. “Emotional truth allows you to fill in those blanks with what would have happened based not on what you remember, but on what you know. What you know, for instance, is how your mother would have reacted to your dad not coming home one night, even if you don’t recall the exactness of the scene you’re writing in which that happened.”
She suggests writers take advantage of “memory pops” or those small snapshots of life that pop into your head without any context. The writers’ job is to provide a context musing about what led up to that memory pop and what followed.
To find these “memory pops,” we might ask questions such as what is the first time you remember experiencing joy, or sadness, or hunger, or peace? What is your first memory of your grandparents? Can you tell us about a journey you were excited or afraid to take?
For more information on writing memoir, Warner has written a great guide, Breaking Ground on Your Memoir.
There are tons or game-like resources that writers can use to draw family stories out. Tales is one intriguing game that might be brought into a classroom to wake up those memory pops.
Warner refers to the Disney film Inside Out. While the film focuses on emotions which always provide a flow of writing ideas, it also follows characters into a memory dump, a site where memories are buried. That might be a great motivator for kids to consider what happens when we leave our memories behind and what gold we might find if we help ourselves or our family members to recall buried memories. I’d take it a step further and ask family members to re-describe a scene from their perspectives to capture multiple viewpoints. The film’s concepts have been re-imagined as a series of books that teachers and librarians might add to your shelves.
Novels are also a great way to get middle graders thinking about how stories shape lives. Two of my favorite are Lisa Yee’s Maizy Chen’s Last Chance which used a unique framework of story within story to show Maizy’s history, her mother’s, her grandparents, and her great grandparents’ stories.
Dan Santat’s graphic memoir, A First Time for Everything, provides readers with insights into being an only child and gaining independence.
Kate DiCamillo’s Because of Winn Dixie is a great look at single parent families.
When I consider most middle grade novels, family history finds its way into the script so use your imagination and bring the books you love to your students. Help them discover the family stories and use these as beginning discussions to get them writing.
We don’t have unlimited budgets to bring in books and movies and games, but we have a ton of imaginative ideas for story starters. Here are some writing prompts I’ve used with students from middle grade through college. Feel free to bring them into your classrooms and, please, feel free to share your ideas in comments:
- Bring in a recipe that you love. Write about the experience of making this or tasting this for the first time. Or students can write a recipe and talk about how it might make them feel to make this or eat it.
- Find an old photo and write about the circumstances you believe surround the snapshot. Better yet, have students bring photos or create illustrations to tell their family stories and turn these into books that students can bring home as family gifts.
- Write down a few memory pops and then fill in the story around that pop.
- Bring in a grab bag of different smells or flavors and have kids pick them with their eyes closed. Write about any memories that these smells bring to you. Of course, make sure, ahead of time, that you’re not including any allergens.
- Define what is old.
- Interview a parent or grandparent about their native land. Ask them why they left or stayed.
- Interview family members about the best day of their lives, the worst day of their lives.
- Write about what makes you happy, sad, fearful, hopeful.
- Where do you spend family celebrations?
- What do you celebrate in your home?
- What do you wish your family could do together?
For more ideas than you could ever hope for, here are a few websites:
Resilient Writers – 100 New Writing Prompts for Memoir Writers
Storii – 70 Question Prompts to Capture Childhood Memories
Writer-ish – 50 Impactful Memoir Writing Prompts to Get You Writing TODAY
