Mr. Mundorf's Class

Mr. Mundorf’s Town Project (adopted from the work of Helen Sadler) Introductory Steps

Mr. Mundorf’s Town Project – Introductory Steps  (Microsoft Word Document)

1. Class Discussion: What’s in a town?

• Establish that a town is made up of many different components.
• Go around the room asking each person to contribute an idea of what is in a town.
• No proper names can be used.  In other words, it isn’t McDonalds, but a fast food restaurant.  This keeps the originality of the town in focus. Some of the names will be modified once your town is named. Instead of having an elementary school you will have SapphireFalls Elementary School.
• Put each suggestion on a sticky note.
• Have students decide where this particular place would be located in the town.

2. Naming the Town

• Names must be original; not drawn from video games, popular movies, etc.  This can sometimes be difficult to ascertain, so you need to pay strict attention to this part. My classes must use a color in the name of the town:
  Blue River Falls, GreenLake, Purpleville, etc.
• Write all suggestions down and let the students vote.  Have run-off voting as necessary. I let the kids vote by secret ballot (heads-down, hands-up) until a town has a clear majority.  

3.  Create a character that lives in the town.

• Students should create a character. Once again they are not allowed to use the name of someone in real life or popular culture. They should include name, age, occupation, family, residence, and something unique about their character. Make sure that their character is appropriate. You don’t want your kids to perpetuate any stereotypes or offend any individuals or groups.  
• Privately have the students tell you about his/her character. This will give you an opportunity to give them a reality check if needed. Many of the students will say they are 20-year-old millionaire doctors, living in mansions, and driving Escalades.  It is a great chance to do reality check: how long does it actually take to become a doctor? Are most doctors millionaires? It will also allow you to help the students who are struggling to come up with an original character.
• The students must keep their new identities secret from their classmates. The project works best when the kids can truly escape into their alias and write without reservation or worry of what their friends will say. Without fail some kids will deduce other students’ identities. The important thing is to discourage that as much as possible.
• As the teacher, you get to be the mayor of the town. Create your own alias for this job. In this role you will be able to write the letters to the residents of the town that contain their weekly assignments.  I also created a few other characters but didn’t tell the students that some of the members of the town were me. This made it even more difficult to guess who people were and gave me a chance to have some fun with them.
• Have students write the basic information on two index cards.  One of these cards is for the teacher to keep track of which student is which character.  This card should include the students’ name and alias. Keep these closely hidden; character identities need to be kept secret.  The other card is for the grab bag, for students to choose someone in town to write to and should only have the alias written on it.  Keep track of everything, because some students will forget whom they are writing to, whom they have already written to, and sometimes even forget who their own character is!

4.  Drawing the Town

• On a large sheet of paper, the students decide how the town is laid out, and go to work drawing the town.  The point is to draw the town, not their individual home or business exclusively.  The groupings of sticky notes help this design activity.
• This “blueprint” is displayed in the room.  Revisions and additions will happen as the students compose their work. After all, towns are always changing and growing.

5.  On to the actual writing…

• Every two weeks the students are given two assignments. All assignments are to be written from the perspective of the character, not the student.
• I write a letter from the desk of the mayor to the residents of the town. In this letter I pose a problem or situation and ask them to explain something to me or to persuade me to see their view point. I utilize the writing prompts given by the state to come up with the main idea of the letter and then create a scenario that makes it applicable to our town.
• In addition to responding to the mayor, the students were also required to write a story about meeting another character for the first time. They choose a character from another town by pulling a card from a bag and have to write a narrative story about the meeting.
• The grading is done using the FCAT writing rubrics (narrative, persuasive, or expository).
• If the kids can not disguise their handwriting, you may want to have them type the assignments on the computer.

6.  Et cetera

• To end the project we have a talk show to reveal the identities of the characters. Each day during the last week of school we reveal 5-10 characters until all 30 are “unmasked”. The students are graded on their ability to stay in character when responding to questions from the host (me).

• All of the students’ work was displayed on a board in my room. Each character has his/her own space on the board. So if you were writing about meeting “Betsy Spaghetti” you could look at all the materials she had written or that had been written about her before beginning your own story.

REFERENCES    

Behn, R. (2004). Capitol county: Changing the writing climate of the whole school. Teachers and Writers, 36 (2), 3-9. 

Scherff, L., & Piazza, C.  (2005). The more things change, the more they stay the same: A survey of high school students’ writing experiences. Research in the Teaching of English, 39 (3), 271-304.