This week’s featured classroom attends Essex Street Academy in NYC, a school that prides itself on its project-based focus on learning and personalized approach to education. The ninth and tenth graders taking a creative writing course with teachers Jenny Platow and Caitlin Thomas were asked to write Six-Word Memoirs after thoroughly analyzing the book, I [...]

“For the shy poets, taking a risk in six words to share a secret, a memory, or a fear is easier than delving into a longer poem.”

Spring always seems to reinvigorate creativity and inspire new ideas. The days are getting longer, the sun is shining brighter and the Six-Word Memoirs are less “Wishing for other [...]

Vermont Academy: 6 Word Memoir Project from Vermont Academy on Vimeo.
Although usually we feature individual classrooms and their Six-Word Memoir feats of creativity, we’re flipping the script this month to share an amazing video project created by students, staff and teachers alike. Meet our newest “Classroom of the Month”, Vermont Academy, a small boarding school [...]

The beauty of the Six-Word Memoir form is that it’s universal. No matter who you are, where you’re from, whether you love or loathe writing, are 7 or 53, anyone and everyone can write the short, short story of his or her life. This month’s featured classroom is a small writing workshop based in Texas. [...]

I’m thrilled to announce the release of the eighth book in the Six-Word Memoir series, Things Don’t Have to be Complicated: Illustrated Six-Word Memoirs by Students Making Sense of the World, published with TED Books, a division of the TED Conference.

Quick links:
• Download the book
• View excerpt/slideshows in the Washington Post and Brain [...]

Since we announced our new book, Things Don’t Have to be Complicated: The Art of Six-Word Memoirs by Students of the World., a project we’re publishing with TED Books (out December 20!), educators across the world have been sending their own classroom portfolios. Among them were five illustrated Six-Word Memoirs from fifth-graders in PS 86 [...]

SMITH Mag’s newest book project-Things Don’t Have to be Complicated: The Art of Six-Word Memoirs by Students of the World-is as awesomely collaborative as the other seven, with a sweet scholarly twist: the Six-Word Memoirs included will be solely student written and illustrated.
Social media savvy teacher at New Tech Academy in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Ginger [...]

Doctor? Lawyer? Psychiatrist? “Mom, shut up!”
Atheism, Judaism. Both isms. Close enough.
Why thirteen? So many voice cracks.

With the Jewish holidays upon us, and our new Six Words on Jewish Life project launched, I wanted to share a recent experience I had in a very special classroom full of young, smart, wonderfully expressive Jewish teens. Each summer [...]

Every Six-Word Memoir book is a different process. They’re all bound by this simple concept—”your life in exactly six words”—but the vibe is never the same. And never has the experience of receiving the submissions been so intense and amazing as it has been for for our upcoming book, Things Don’t Have to be Complicated: [...]

“Saturday to Saturday makes the summer.” - Mike Zinn
“Mini-golf is the best game ever.” - Danny Zinn (Mike’s son)

Six words have taken me as far as the Cayman Islands to lead a corporate workshop and as close as down the street to do a storytelling workshop with kids at an after-school program in Brooklyn. And [...]