Welcome to the new online format of Acorn Stories. Each year, the Live Oak faculty present various writing genres of writing to their students: fiction, poetry and prose, narratives, and non-fiction; the teachers guide them through the process, sharing with them examples as well as walking them through each of the steps. Acorn Stories 2019 provide our students with an opportunity to say, “I’m a published author,” as they share these writings with the extended school community. Within this online edition, they will show you their understanding of a particular genre, while giving you insights into to their thoughts and personalities. You will read about the good and the bad, the fun experiences and the harder ones, the lessons they learned and the content they studied this year. We want to thank all of our lower school faculty and middle school humanities teachers for supporting and nurturing Live Oak students, giving them the tools to articulate a vision and share ideas through writing. And thank you to Savannah Guinn, Admissions Associate, for all of her work uploading documents and scanning files. And thank you to Live Oak parents who helped edit student work. This summer, we hope you have the chance to sit back and enjoy the writing.

Roslyn Benjamin, Assistant Head of School

Emma Peat, Middle School Head

Kindergarten North and South

Kindergarteners come to school with incredible story-telling abilities. Each of their perspectives is uniquely based on their experiences and understandings of the world at this point in time.  All year long they fill their personal journals with dictated stories. They record the events and ideas that are meaningful to them and represent a moment in time. Magical powers, mystical creatures, and unicorns are the topics of some, while others focus on real-life events like family trips or holiday celebrations. The children see their stories recorded, hear them read back, and illustrate them.  As the year progresses, they begin to add more letters, words or sentences to the dictated text. Years from now these journals will become remarkable time machines. The adults who read them will get a glimpse into the world of their five and six-year-old selves. These stories below were selected by the students.

First Grade East and West

First graders sprung into spring by exploring poetry. They listened to the rhymes, rhythms, and repetition of short poems. They used their mind’s eyes to picture the images evoked by poetic language, and they read poems written from the perspective of everyday objects. Once they had read a variety of poems, it was the first graders’ turn to try their hand at creating poems. At the end of our unit, students picked their favorite poem to share with all of you!

Second Grade East and West

Second graders were immersed in poetry this winter.  As they read different kinds of poems, second grade writers learned how poets stir strong feelings and create lasting images. Second graders learned to write with an ear, using line breaks to control the pace and rhythm of words and to create special effects on the page. They learned to experiment with language, word choice, and comparisons–craft techniques they can apply to other genres of writing. Poetry helped our students open their eyes to the beauty of the earth, cultivate a belief in the power of language, and begin to understand the truths inside them.

Third Grade East

In the third east classroom, students embarked on a mini-research project on influential women, reading and writing about women who have made strides toward gender equality. They used narrative nonfiction, expository texts, and online sources to gather information about these women. They researched with these two questions in mind:

• How have women fought against gender (and race) inequality to make change?

• How can their example influence others to fight for equality.
  

Please read and enjoy their books!

Third Grade West

In third grade west, we transformed into poets by learning how to look at something ordinary and turn it into something extraordinary- we call this method using a poet’s eye. We practiced using our poet’s eye by first looking at an ordinary object in a new way. A crystal became a rocket, an acorn a baby, a foxtail into a flag. We used these observations to create a poem. We quickly realized that in life, poet’s write about something that is more meaningful than an object. We connected moments from our lives that mattered to us as we incorporated the five senses into our poems. You will notice that each poem uses a poet’s eye, has meaningful line breaks that pause for dramatics, a rhythm or beat, and the five senses that help make each poem come alive. We hope you enjoy reading a small, but powerful moment in our lives that we have decided to share with you!

Fourth Grade East and West

In fourth grade, students participated in many writing units over the course of the school year including, personal narrative in which they wrote about a moment in their life that was memorable, persuasive essay, fiction/fantasy as well as poetry. During the poetry unit the fourth grade also collaborated with library and art to create amazing Haiku poem/art projects.  Students chose which published piece they would like featured in Acorn Stories. We are proud of all of the work fourth grade writers accomplished this year and we hope you find joy in reading the selections.

Fifth Grade

During our expository writing unit during the fifthies learned the structure of a traditional essay, along with a variety of innovative techniques. For our unit mentor texts, we listened to and read many essays by youth and adults from the KQED Perspectives program. We walked to the radio and television studios of KQED to learn more about how these programs are created. As you read our anthology, be prepared to open your mind and be persuaded by some well-crafted arguments.

Sixth Grade

The class of 2021 explored many aspects of their emerging identities through writing exercises, class activities, book discussions, and journaling. Each student wrote a poem that invites the reader to take a step into their world, sharing their homes and traditions through sights, sounds, smells, and emotions. These “I Am From” poems allowed students to get to know returning and new members of the community in new ways and to see each other’s unique perspectives. They went through many stages of the writing process, from observing in their thinking journals to brainstorming with webs, from developing rubrics to “brain-dumping,” from writing to rewriting and writing again, to proofreading, self- and peer-editing. We invite you to discover something new about the sixth grade writers as you dive into their worlds of self, home, and family.

Seventh Grade

Belligerent! Sullen! Ostentatious! Seventh graders wrote stories to bring these and other advanced vocabulary words to life. After studying and learning a long list of words, each student chose one word to feature in a Personified Vocabulary Word Story. Loosely modeled on the Mr. Men series of the 1970’s (Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Worry, etc.), these stories were an opportunity for students to create new characters (Ms. Copious, Mr. Haggle, etc.) to show the meaning of an advanced word. The end result is a series of fully illustrated story-books that define new words for readers of all ages. After completing their books, seventh graders did guest readings in lower school classrooms to share their stories (and their vocabulary words) with younger students at Live Oak.

Eighth Grade

All year, the eighth graders revisited the same question: what does it mean to be American? They studied United States history and current events and consistently bringing their conversations back to this central throughline. To close out the year, each student was asked to answer this question in a narrative poem. Each poem is unique and shows just some of their many ideas.  Please enjoy their poems and thoughtful connections to the curriculum and their world today.