2. THUMBPRINT AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
Multimodal Narratives

3. Introduction
In this lesson, you will explore the essential questions, “Who am I?” and “What makes me, me?” through multimodal narrative writing. For this creative composition, you will engage in reflective writing and an up close look at your thumbprints. Throughout this process you will also be working with figurative language, question generation, and visual composition. Ultimately, we will re-think how a personal narrative can appear.

4. Task Your task is to compose a personal multimodal narrative.
You will reflect on and respond to a list of questions, as well as generate your own.
You will ultimately create an original Thumbprint Autobiography multimodal narrative using the pre-writing and your own original questions.

5. Step 1
To begin, we will complete a quickwrite. Answer the following questions:
-What makes you unique?
-What sets you apart from everyone else and makes you, you?
Once the quickwrite is written, we will share as a whole class.

6. Step 2
After sharing quickwrites, we will watch the following two videos. We will use these videos as a basis to examine our own fingerprints.
While watching the videos:
Analyze your fingerprints. Pay special attention to the lines of your thumbprint- you’ll use them later!
After watching the videos:
Analyze a partner’s fingerprints and share what you discovered.

7. Step 3
Remember that our task was to write a narrative about ourselves. Before we begin writing, we are going to compose the template in which the narratives will take form.
Click here for the template of how the Thumbprint Autobiography will appear.
On a separate sheet of paper, draw an oval that fills the space of a standard 8 ½ x 11 sheet. Remember the lines you examined on your thumbprint? Inside the oval, you will lightly pencil in those lines. These will be the lines that hold your narrative content. You can see how your thumbprint will look by seeing student examples here. Tip: draw all lines lightly, because eventually they will be erased.

8. Step 4 Now you will begin to write the content of your narrative
For the content, you need to complete the following on a separate sheet of paper:
Use the Thumbprint Autobiography handout here for ideas of questions to answer.
Once questions have been answered, start transferring the content of your narrative into the lines of your thumbprint.
Write all content in pencil first, then go over it with colored pencils or thin markers to add color. You may add symbols or images throughout that represent you as well.

9. Step 5
The final step of your Thumbprint Autobiography is to go back and erase all pencil lines. That way, your narrative will be formed only by the text of your story.

10. Conclusion
Now that you have completed the Thumbprint Autobiography, you should see that a personal narrative does not have to look a certain way.
You should be able to see that the content that tells your story is completely unique and is all about you!