Narrative Writing

I really need to do a better job of blogging while we are working on these things and not as an afterthought. :) But here is what we worked on during first quarter in writing! We worked really hard on learning what a narrative is and how writers write them.

In the beginning, students had a difficult time generating a narrative story. You can think of people, times [first, last, aha moments], places, and feelings of small moment stories. We also learned that writers live differently, by making observations, jotting down quotes or song lyrics that really make them think, or reading stories from authors as mentor texts and figuring out what they did to make their stories captivate us.

Once students got writing, we made an anchor chart to help us raise the level of our narrative writing. Some suggestions that were provided to students were: 

We also had to review the structure of a story, which will come in handy in our next reading unit!

Sometimes, students got stuck even before the story took off! We had to review how we might start our pieces without stressing out too much.

As we began revising and editing our pieces, we had to reorganize our sentences or thoughts so that it flowed and the audience would be able to completely follow the storyline.

AND, our stories would not have been revised without the help of a writing partner. They were the ones who listened to our drafts and provided feedback so that we could continue to grow as a writer. But before we could work with a partner, we had to make sure we had some strategies to help us be an effective partner!