Sometimes our Let's Talk conversation class gets creative, and for this assignment we worked on our writing skills. The prompt was borrowed from 826 Digital, which provides teachers with writing prompts and resources. The prompt was submitted by award-winning author Jason Reynolds, and the learning objective is as follows: Students will learn an interesting way to use descriptive language, and, for fiction writers, a way to build characters.
Prompt: Students will write a personal narrative where they describe themselves as a place. Not a specific place, but all the things a “place” consists of. What’s the weather? What’s the terrain? Is this a city or a suburb? A farm? A different planet? Are there lots of people there? What’s it smell like? Is it loud? Is there traffic? Street vendors and hustlers? You get the point. Turn the body and mind into an environment through your writing.
After a bit of discussion on descriptive language using our five senses, students got to work and were given homework to finish the assignment. Nohemi Velazquez submitted her powerful and creative work and was willing to share it. Thank you, Nohemi!
The Whole Place
I see each man and woman as a whole, entire world, with a sole soul.
A magnificent world, perfectly designed by its good Creator.
As you and me.
We perhaps visit one day the green grass around a beautiful lake. It grants us an amazing view, so we may feel that comfort and peace…
Next, it starts to rain… from a fresh breeze to a “cats and dogs” storm that puts you in an easy-drowning camp. Then, we need to rapidly move on, keep going.
Probably, we find a dry place on the way, where we can get some needed rest, and fall asleep there for a while… so we suddenly wake up and realize that all around us is completely desolated, totally empty as a desert… naturally, we have the impulse to go far away from there, from the “nothing” place… but, before begin the running, if we have reached sufficient maturity and a healing of the soul, it happens that we open widely our eyes and find a particular calm and beauty in that place. “It’s a very good place to visit”, we wonder…and continue the trip.
Going forward, we lift our sight and surprisingly, we’re witnessing the most gracious field, full of flowers and trees, the precious dawn over there, offering us the most marvelous colors we have ever seen…
Until then, we may look backwards and it appears we were walking through all this on our own. But it is not true.
Because everyone, each of us, we are a community. Our souls embrace our loved persons, but our not so loved ones too. All people that meant something along our lives.
And, realize or not, our loving Father was taking us all the way into his hands. If we’d wish so, we can be happy and peaceful in each of those places and into our inner world… we just have to figure out how enormously loved we are...
