Men Making A Difference

Stories From The Shed
The goal of the Stories from the Shed is to document and share the notable and diverse lived experiences and lessons in life accumulated recalled by members of the Mount Gravatt Men’s Shed community. Taking the form of personal memoirs, anecdotes, and biographies, they are reflective in nature and provide a useful stimulus for examining this form of personal writing.
Introduction
This resource has been created to complement and support the use of the Stories from the Shed collection of personal stories written by members of the Mount Gravatt Men’s Shed.
A significant goal of the Stories from the Shed is to document and share the notable and diverse lived experiences and lessons in life accumulated recalled by members of the Mount Gravatt Men’s Shed community. Taking the form of personal memoirs, anecdotes, and biographies, they are reflective in nature and provide a useful stimulus for examining this form of personal writing.
The stories also provide a valuable opportunity to engage with the stories and experiences of members of the local Brisbane community. These stories may resonate, develop understanding, or foster readers making connections between the ideas, experiences and lessons of the storyteller and those of themselves, families or other people in their own lives.
Personal and biographical writing can include a number of text types and allows writers to develop their own style - an authorial voice. Memoirs, of varying length, are a common form of biographical writing and one through which storytellers can develop their own voice as a writer, as well as exercise critical reflective skills.
In appropriate contexts, the sharing or the collaboration in writing and editing of these texts can also contribute to a community. There are internet guides around writing memoirs. Further detail about language and communication choices appropriate to personal/biographical writing is also provided in the Curriculum resource document as part of this program.
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The school curriculum document is separately available and includes Selected Content Descriptions from the Australian Curriculum in English and may be used to target learning experiences.