"I was full of hopeful anxiety." This was my heartfelt sentence crafted after leaving the data team meeting when I quickly tried to craft my imitation sentence to go with this week's mentor sentence from Paulsen's Hatchet, "I was full of tough hope."
You can read my blog from last school year about mentor sentences. I love them. I love the warm up style of inquiry into craft. I enjoy finding the sentence that is well crafted and related to a skill or craft I need to teach.
This week my 6th grade students have noticed pronouns, the shift in point of view from Paulsen's sentence to mine, unusual word pairings, forms of hope used as different parts of speech, and much more. Tomorrow my students will write their own sentences. I look forward to seeing their unusual pairing.
What I am enjoying with Hatchet is trying to write like Paulsen writes pairing unusual words together to emphasize meaning.
Hopeful anxiety expresses much of what I am feeling now at the beginning of this school year with too much to do, too little time, changes in administration, increased expectations, more emphasis on test scores, a new leadership position, and my continual OCD tendencies that have me planning well into the night (and sometimes AM) to make things just right.
I love your sentence. I just started at my school Monday. I've been feeling a lot of anxiety. Mixing in hope makes a big difference.
ReplyDelete