In a memoir, a person shares the story of their life.

Looking back, what

mattered most? What relationships, events, decisions, jobs, trips,
choices, and situations affected them? How did they grow and change
based on those experiences?

You may have read some famous memoirs, like Becoming, by Michelle
Obama, I am Malala, by MalalaYousafzai, or Walden, by Henry David
Thoreau.

A memoir doesn’t have to be about everything that’s happened in a life.

It can focus in on one important relationship, one big event, or one era in
a person’s life.

For this mini-memoir project, you can decide whether to focus on one
part of your life, or to try to cover a few different important elements of
your own history. But here’s the trick, your memoir is going to be just six
words long.

Think about your own life, and decide whether you want to focus in on
one vital moment or relationship, or try to cover six different important
elements of your life.

Whichever you choose, use the back of this sheet to brainstorm some
key words that you might use in your six word memoir. Your memoir
can be a sentence, like “The day she arrived, everything changed.” Or
it can be a series of key words like “tennis / journalism / Sarah /
frosting / meditation / photography.”

Once you choose your six words, letter them onto your template in six
rows going down. You can put your word in the first or second box in
each row. The adjoining box in each row is a space for you to
illuminate those important words, however you wish to do so. You can
add words of explanation, quotations, descriptions, drawings,
symbols, icons, bits of collage and/or photographs. The idea is to
represent yourself and your story through both your six words and
your illumination of those six words.