Planning for a Narrative

To help students get used to creating a plan for a narrative, we did a bit of practise. 

We began by creating massive lists for "setting", "characters", and "plot" and all students in the class contributed their ideas to our class posters. This helped generate ideas of what you could write a narrative about. 

In the next session when we introduced the planning template to the students, our class completed the following activity. I wrote each different idea for characters (ex. cowboys, astronauts, doctors, aliens) and each different idea for settings (ex. beach, archeology dig, museum, bank) on little slips of paper. 

One by one, each students came up and selected one paper for setting and one paper for characters from a jar. They then had to create a plot and storyline that involved the settings and characters they selected and complete a planning document for that.

An example is the following:

Setting: Outer Space

Characters: Cowboys

(Students had to create their own plots related to those items)

Plot: Cowboys get trapped in outer space as punishment for losing a rodeo. 

Resolution: The cowboys use their lassos to catch Earth and drag themselves back to Earth. 

This activity was wonderful and students had so much fun coming up with all their amazing creative ideas. Also, this activity is great for EAL students as it forces them to think outside of what they are familiar with. An EAL student in my class picked "ocean" as his setting and "soccer players" as his characters. He knew what soccer players were as he loves soccer but had to ask what the "ocean" was. After explaining to him and showing him a picture, he knew exactly what it was and was then able to plan a story. 

Developing a Character

One of the first things we worked on in narrative writing is the development of a character. I wanted students to come up with as many descriptive words they could use to describe personality and physical appearance. A wonderful idea that my team came up with was to present students with a picture of a person and have them develop a character based on that prompt. 

After finding a bunch of photos online, each student was given a picture. The pictures represented people of all ages, genders, races, religions etc. etc. 

Students had to describe the physical characteristics of the character in their photo. They then had to create a personality for this person, state the role (career) of the character, their challenge and achievements and whether or not they would like to be friends with them. 

It was crucial that students knew there was no right or wrong with this activity, and that it was their own character that they were creating. 

AWESOME activity!!! Please use this in narrative writing :)

Writing Ladder - Updated

For information report writing, I used a writing ladder which worked wonderfully!

For narrative writing, I have updated my writing ladder and it looks like this:

This time, I've made it look like a ladder and the students have to "climb" up the ladder as they progress through writing their narrative. 

Each students' name is placed on a little laminated card that they move up the ladder as they finish that part of their narrative writing. 

Our ladder steps from the beginning to the end are:

Plan, Develop the Characters, Set the Scene, Orientation, Complication, Resolution, Self Editing and Revising, Publishing, Group Editing

Narrative Rubric

As you may remember (and if you don't, check out this post: Writing Unit Sequence, my writing sequence to begin a new writing genre always includes a rubric.

Here is the rubric jointly created by our class.

The students chose Structure, Creativity, Writing Process, Language Features, and Grammar and Spelling as the categories for a narrative rubric. 

Then working in small groups, they filled in what a 5*, 4*, and 3* and lower narrative would look like for each category. 

Once again, excellent collaboration between students. 

The creation of rubrics by the students is a part of the e5 Instructional Model, as it relates to the engage section of the model: "The teacher presents a purpose for learning, determining challenging learning goals, and making assessment and performance requirements clear."

Narrative Writing Goals

This is one the best parts of starting a new writing genre...

student self-evaluation and goal setting for their own writing

The idea behind this lesson is that students (especially in grade 6) are given greater ownership and accountability over their own work. By setting their own writing goals, they have achievable and visible goals set for their own writing.

To set our writing goals, students were given their pre-tests back and they had to use the rubric that we created as a class to mark their work. From that, they needed to choose the three areas that they felt they needed to improve upon from the rubric. These areas then were turned into writing goals. As a class, we shared our individual writing goals and  create a class list of the top goals.

The top goals selected by the students for narrative writing were:

1. Have a detailed plan

2. Include a title, orientation, complication, and resolution (and sometimes a cliffhanger)

3. Write in full paragraphs

4. Have lots of juicy language (descriptive and figurative)

5. Be CREATIVE (Is my story exciting to read?)

6. Use a range of punctuation correctly

They are along the left side of the poster. Then, when we work on our group editing session, students add their names (on sticky notes) to the box corresponding to the goal they achieved. They can then go back and revise to ensure they have achieved all these goals in their writing. Students love seeing their name beside each goal and really worked hard because of this.

This strategy relates to the e5 Instructional Model components of engage and evaluate.

- Engage: Teachers provide support for students to create and achieve their learning goals. 

- Evaluate: Students are able to evaluate their progress and achievements. (and in a visual format)

Banned Words for Narrative Writing

In hopes of making our narratives more exciting to read, the grade five/six teachers created a list of words that were banned from students narrative. There include: big, small, happy, sad, good and bad.

As a class, we created a massive list of synonyms that could be used in narratives instead of those words. I ran this activity as a competition for the best list between mixed ability groups. Each student in the group was given a specific tool they could use to add to their list: a thesaurus, Microsoft Encarta Dictionaries on their netbook, online thesaurus, Microsoft Word thesaurus, and one member writing the list.

And here, my friends, are the wonderful lists created by my wonderful students:

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.