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Activity: Revisiting Your First Home:
A Three-Part Writing Exercise
Part I
Ask your students to close their eyes
and picture walking through the first house they ever lived
in.
Tell them:
If you cannot remember the first house you ever lived in,
be content to imagine the first house you do remember. Or
perhaps, the house you live in now is the only house you
ever lived in. Whatever the circumstances, you are going
to imagine slowly walking through each room and looking
carefully at each detail in that room.
First enter the front or side or back
door. Do you have a key? Is the door open? Are there smells
of cooking or food coming from the kitchen? The sound of
a TV or radio? What or who greets you as you walk through
the front door? And where do you end up once you’ve
walked through the door? A hallway? A room?
In the next few minutes you will walk
your way through the house, trying to remember as much detail
as possible. What colors are the walls? Are there pictures
on them or photographs? What kind of furniture sits in each
room? As you slowly walk through the house, remember as
much as you can about each room. You can pan the room or
scan from the bottom of the floor to the top of the ceiling.
You can also look out windows, under the cushions of sofas,
or through magazine racks. Or you can just enter the room
and see what strikes you about it—see what first comes
barreling through the filter of your memory.
The point is to go as slowly as possible
and to observe what you see as if you are actually visiting
the house. You will have at least 10 minutes of undisturbed
time to do this exercise. You will not have to report back
what you’ve found. You will walk through the house
slowly and take as much time as you like in each room.
Possible Modifications for Part I
1. As a class, brainstorm possible questions
to help draw out details about each room. Do this before
you begin the visualization.
2. Ask the student to walk through the
house at various ages and times of his or her life—for
instance, as an eight-year-old coming home from school on
a rainy day.
3. If a student is having a hard time
visualizing the house, you can work with him or her individually,
asking him or her to describe the rooms in the house to
you while you record the descriptions. You can prompt the
student’s memory with questions that ask for a detailed
and a specific kind of recall.
What room are you in right now?
Are you standing or walking on a
hardwood floor? A carpet? Linoleum?
What do you see when you stand in
the center of the room and look straight ahead?
Does the room smell a particular
way?
Are there windows? Are they open?
What’s the temperature like
in the house?
4. You can also ask students to work in
pairs, taking turns recording and narrating.
Part II
This part of the activity asks students
to refine further and expand their memory of their first
house through drawing and graphing. It relies on Part I
of the activity.
Materials: Graph paper and unlined
paper, pencil, or pen
Ask students to draw a floor plan of their
remembered houses (if there is more than one level to their
remembered house, let them know they can draw each level
on a separate piece of paper or choose just one level to
draw). When students are done drawing the floor plan, ask
them to place an object of significance in each of the rooms.
Part III
This part of the activity consists of
a timed free-writing exercise.
Materials: Paper and pencil or
pen, or a computer
Ask students to choose three objects that
they placed in their house. Ask students to write about
the objects, spending five to seven minutes on each one.
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