My first writing unit each year is Writing Personal Narratives. It is a great writing unit to start with as you are getting to know your new group of students at the beginning of the year. This unit can help you get to know your students as they share special moments with you.
Mentor Texts to Introduce Personal Narratives
The first thing I like to do is make sure students understand what a personal narrative is. The best way to do this is share mentor text that are examples of personal narratives. In my opinion no one does this better than the author Patricia Polacco. All of Polacco’s books are based are real events from her life. Click the link below to watch an amazing interview with this wonderful lady to learn a litte more about her.
There are so many amazing books by Patricia Polacco to use as a mentor text but one of my favorites for this is Thunder Cake. It is a great book to talk about all the things that are part of a personal Narrative. See the links below for an online read aloud and the Amazon Link for this book.
Personal Narrative Checklist
After we read it is time to learn what makes this text a Personal Narrative. To do this I will create an anchor chart like the one below. We will go through each part and discuss how Thunder Cake has each of these items on our checklist. This is a good time to have students turn and talk with partners as you go through the checklist to share and then share their ideas.
Student Writing Time
Every Writing Workshop time needs to have a time for students to do some writing. For this writing time click the image below for two different ideas for this writing response to Thunder Cake.
In our next lesson we will look at Brainstorming ideas for our own personal narrative.
Until Then…
