Another Post About Nie

Painting for Nie
Originally uploaded by mytinystar

Yes, I know - some of you are tired of reading about Stephanie but that's just too bad because I'm far from tired of writing about her.

Jaimee Rose - a reporter for the Arizona Reporter - has been following NieNie's story from its beginning and today's paper has another follow up. I just spent the past hour catching up on the portions of the ongoing article I've missed and wanted to pass the link to those of you interested. (That's it above - the "NieNie's story" bit - I finally figured out how to do this!)

If you look to the right hand side of the page that pops up, you'll see hyperlinks to other articles and even some slideshows with actual voiceover commentary from Stephanie herself.

Some of the information presented in this 5 part series is new to me, ie. wasn't mentioned on the Oprah or the Today Show interviews I've watched, and goes into detail about the crash itself, including some very intimate details of the difficult choice her husband made that day.

I highly recommend this read - Jaimee Rose is a talented writer who has done a brilliant job sorting through what must amount to mounds of interview notes and choosing just the right details to include in this captivating article. The slideshows are a perfect complement to the written words.

Because there is a wealth of genre sources out there on the Nielson's story, including news articles in traditional and popular papers and periodicals, television appearances by the Nielson's family members and by the Neilson's themselves, blog posts by Stephanie, her family members, and strangers like me, and arts-n-crafts created to raise money to offset the families expenses, I feel its the perfect subject for a multi-genre project.

Perhaps I'll model the project's creation step by step for my students as I write it. In the past, I've talked them through the project (the first time I assigned it last year) and used finished projects (one of my own and some of the ones my students created) as models (when I assigned it earlier this year to my Honors students).

Whereas this year's students grasped the multi-genre concept quicker than last year's did, they still had a lot of questions about the approach since it's so new to them. I think that by observing all of the steps I take - from conception to creation - in my multi-genre journey, my students will be able to easily embark on their own journeys and produce more meaningful, authentic works in the end.