Category: Cohen

Africans In NY: Creative Narrative Assignment

For the final project of the second trimester of seventh grade Humanities, we worked on a creative narrative assignment! We were first told what a creative narrative assignment was. We learned that it is a creative writing piece from the perspective of a given character. Then we were given papers containing information about a real slave who lived in the New York Colony! I was given a man named Charles Roberts. Charles Roberts was a runaway slave who lived in the early 1960´s in New Amsterdam. I started by underlining ten pieces of information about Roberts, and then found ten key terms about the New York Colony that we had learned earlier in the trimester. I found myself focusing more on the creative and made up parts of Roberts life in the first paragraph, while writing a lot about the true things I learned in his bio in the second. I handed it in to be peer-edited by Harvey Van Blerkom. I then peer-edited Harvey´s, and found that I was making almost identical mistakes to him. I decided to revise and edit just one more time before turning in the final draft. I found my actual piece littered with grammatical errors and a few mistakes in my sentence structures. For example, I described a wood stair case as plush, when a better word would have been mahogany or almond-stained. I eventually was satisfied with my work, and I turned my two paragraphs in. I found my grades to be amazing, but I wish I had just checked over my work one more time to bring my grammatical grade slightly up. I loved this assignment so much, and would love to adventure down a creative narrative assignment again.