I remember learning to write, or rather I remember hating to write. I never knew what to write or what they wanted me to say or how to do it well. Things were much easier for me when I got older and we were writing reactions to text or essays. I knew the topic and I knew how to get a point across. I wish my teachers had known how to guide young writers the way we do today.
One of the things we teach children is to draw from their own experiences. Many schools use the Units of Study developed by Lucy Calkins. In third grade, we started the year with a personal narrative. It’s sort of amazing the jump between second and third grade. In my state, third grade is a testing year and the pressures on teachers and students is enormous. So when we start the year, we hit the ground running. I can’t say as I have enough hours in the day to teach everything Calkins wants (anyone who has read her lesson plans – feel free to weigh in), but I did find a way to buy myself some extra time and help my students out in the process.
While teaching students to draw from their own experiences in their writing, I conducted a reading unit on autobiographies and memoirs. I’m not going to tease out the difference between the two because extensive online research never gave me any definitive on the subject (if you have something definitive, comment and link it!!) The best I ever got is that autobiographies tend to be more fact driven and memoirs are more story telling, but if everyone isn’t standard in this distinction, it sort of makes it irrelevant.
My idea was that if students are going to have to write about their own lives, the more examples of this I gave, the better. There are tons of great picture books to read aloud – Patricia Polacco and Cynthia Rylant are both amazing authors who have written about their own childhoods. But I wanted books for the students to read for their Guided Reading groups as well (for those unfamiliar with Guided Reading it is a program where reading is taught in small groups based on comprehension skills. These groups change frequently throughout the year based on reading ability and the skills students need to learn. The changes occur at the end of a reading unit, not mid book, that would be crazy.)
I always carefully selected books for my groups that I hoped would inspire them to tell their own stories. This month I’ll share reviews of many different books written by authors about their own lives. I’m always hoping to find new recommendations for my colleagues and for my students.
For the curious, my classroom selections were:
Thank You, Mr. Falker
26 Fairmount Avenue
Little House in the Big Woods 
When I talk about autobiography vs memoir with my students, we discuss that an autobiography often covers the writer’s whole life (up to the time of writing), whereas as a memoir often focuses on a particular time in that person’s life or a particular aspect of their life.
I love this theme. Can’t wait to see what you cover! I do excerpts from Black Ice by Lorene Cary with my 9th graders. Have you read it? It’s about a girl’s experience being one of the few black students at St. Paul’s School in Concord, NH in the early ’70s. I would call it memoir.