Describe your initial emotional response to the story. Because short stories are often complex, one emotional response may not adequately reflect the range of responses you had as you read. If that is the case with this story, be sure to describe the range of your responses, noting what events or characters evoked the responses. Explain the range of your associative responses. It is not unusual for old songs, for example, to take us back to where we were, what we were doing, and who we were with when we first heard the songs.
Similar associations affect our interpretations of literature.
Describe it below and explain why you feel it is the most important. You need not look for a particular theme, of course, but it is important that you do identify what you believe to be the most important part of the story. If my goal is to have the students flesh out their response statements as drafts for more formal interpretations, they can load the Invent response file into Daedalus Write. With both the prompts and their responses to them now available in a Write file, students can begin broadening and deepening their response statements. If, on the other hand, my goal is to have students immediately share one another's responses, reflecting the idea that seeing how others have responded to the prompts will reveal to every reader in the class the range of possible emotional and associative responses a common text can produce, I ask them to make their responses public using either InterChange or Mail.