The document provides writing prompts for students to write short stories based on Christmas memories. It instructs students to write about a specific Christmas memory and share it with the class. It then discusses Thomas's writing techniques like alliteration, patterns of linked words, dialogue, similes, metaphors and personification. Students are prompted to write their own "Memories of Christmas" piece using some of Thomas's writing techniques and beginning structures. The document concludes by providing the final exam date and assigned readings.

4. Write a few words associated with
a specific Christmas/holiday
memory that you would not mind
sharing with the class
 Put your memory in the box
 Pull out a card (much like Thomas’s
idea of “plunging [his] hand into
the snow and taking out a
memory.”


6. 

What do you notice about Thomas’s
writing?
What techniques do you notice him
using?

7. 

Now write your own “Memories of Christmas”
piece
Try to make your writing interesting and use
some of the techniques Thomas uses
(alliteration, patterns of words or words that
are linked in meaning e.g.
bright, light, shining, sunny, sparkling, snippet
s of dialogue, and similes, metaphors, and
personification to help create vivid images or
pictures)

8. 
Try to use one of Thomas’s beginnings:
One Christmas was so much like another…
 It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas
Eve…
 Now out of that bright white snowball of Christmas
gone…
 Christmas morning was always…
 I remember that on the afternoon of Christmas
Day…
 I remember that we were singing carols once…


9. Link

12. Final is Wednesday, December 11, 2013, from
7:30 a.m. until 9:30 a.m.
Read, annotate, and be prepared to discuss at
length:
 Yeats “Easter, 1916” (pp. 20932095), “September 1913” (pp. 20922093), “The Second Coming” (pp. 2099)
 Heaney “Casualty” (pp. 29572959), “Punishment” (pp. 2955-2956)
 Orwell “Politics and the English Language”
(pp. 2610-2619)