Six-Word Memoirs
"Six-word Memoirs" was a collaboration between Humanities (me) and Art (Shani Leader). Students wrote six-word memoirs in Humanities, and then in Art, transformed their memoirs into small artworks using their choice of media.
How this project worked (in Humanities)
On the very first day of school, I gave every student a composition book (which was to be their "Write Club" notebook), and a "Write Club" sticker. Their first assignment, after preparing their notebook, was to write a six-word memoir. You can see how I introduced this assignment in the google slideshow below (I introduce the six-word memoirs on slide 12):
And that was it! That was all we did in Humanities. After that, the project was in Shani Leader's hands. She made sure the pieces were complete in time for Parents' Evening, and we exhibited them in my classroom. The project accomplished a few things:
- Got everyone thinking about how to represent their personal history concisely in words and images, which was a theme for the rest of the year.
- Established an immediate link between disciplines.
- Put student work on the classroom walls and gave parents something beautiful to look at on Parent's Evening
- Helped to establish what it is that we value right from the start. I don't know whether having these artworks on the wall had an impact on how parents' understood what their students would be doing this year, but it felt good to me to be starting in this way.
You can see a list of every single six-word memoir here.
Some notable six-word memoirs.
There were a few six-word memoirs that particularly grabbed my attention. Some I wrote down, and some I photographed.
Here are a few that I wrote down:
And here are a few that I photographed:
Here are a few that I wrote down:
- Nothing fixes me, but helping others
- My heart is still in Kenya
- I'm not really a social person
- Writing. Oh God. Kill me now.
And here are a few that I photographed:
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Gallery: Final products
As I get more photos of these, I will add to this collection.