Narrative Deconstruction

Above is our joint deconstruction of a narrative titled "There's an Alien in My Bedroom". After completing our discovery charts, students had a fair idea of the various features and the structure of a narrative and were able to apply this knowledge to the narrative presented to them. This is all part of our writing sequence of lessons used to begin a new writing genre.

Writing Unit Sequence

You may have noticed a bit of a pattern that I use when teaching a writing unit. I often start the units the same way, as I believe that these core lessons are utterly important in any writing genre. I thought I would give you a quick run-down on the sequence of lessons I use to start a writing unit. These are usually all taught within the first two weeks of introducing the new writing genre. 

So here we go...

Lesson 1: Writing pre-test for the genre

Lesson 2: Discovery Chart to identify features and structure of the genre

Lesson 3: Deconstruction of a sample text 

Lesson 4: Joint creation (teacher and students) of a rubric 

Lesson 5: Student evaluation of their pre-test with the rubric created by the class

Lesson 6: Student creation of own writing goals for the genre based on their self-evaluation with the rubric (this leads to the creation of a writing goals poster)

And after this is done, we begin to work more in detail on specific genre of writing. Hope this spawns some wonderful ideas for writing in your classroom!

Deconstruction of an Information Report

In the beginning of our unit on information report writing, as a class, we deconstructed an information report on the Olympics. I wrote on the large paper and each student had their own copy to fill out as well.

The lesson prior to this was the research chart, in which students had to locate similar features and structure of five different information reports. They used their knowledge from this lesson in the deconstruction. (See post: Features of an Information Report)

*Sorry for the terrible photography!