hamiltonhe
- Feb 8, 2020
- 10 min read

Narrowing the focus and narrative writing

Updated: Feb 9, 2020

I have been learning a lot about writer’s notebooks and how to help students to create entries in them and to come up with ideas for what to write about. In this week’s blog, I am going to be talking about how to help children find writing topics that they want to write about and helping them to find their own personal stories. It is important to get kids to write about themselves and explore narrative writing because every child has some story to tell and being able to write their story and have it validated by a teacher or peers is very powerful. In another blog post on Two Writing Teachers, written by BethMooreSchool, they wrote something that really stood out to me and made me think about narrative writing differently:

“But EVERY kid has a story–many stories, in fact. And that is what a personal narrative unit is all about. It’s about honoring the experiences that kids bring with them to your classroom every day (the good, the bad, and the ugly experiences too). It’s about saying “YES! Minecraft IS exciting to hear about!” “YES! I do want to hear another story about walking to school in the morning!” “YES! Please write about the big fight, the mistake you made, the trouble you got into.” “YES! YES! YES! You do have stories to tell. Yes, your real true life, your lived experience is worthy. Write it.”

This is important to me and should be important to all teachers because this narrative writing could be a great in with your students and get them hooked into writing and enjoying it. Growing up I never really liked writing, matter of fact, I kind of hated it. Teachers would always make us write about what they wanted us to write about and I never felt like I could be open with my writing. I always felt that I had to write what would make the teacher happy, otherwise I would get a bad grade. But, being open with students and modeling an experience from your own life and having some vulnerability with them, will help them to feel more comfortable and open with writing and not being afraid to take some chances. Especially if you encourage them to take those chances and to validate their ideas and try to be just as passionate as your students are about a topic. I think that BethMooreSchool wrote it perfectly in her blog post about telling students that their stories and ideas are great and that you can’t wait to read them.

There are many different ways that you can help students to come up with topics to write about and then pull from one of those ideas to create into a narrative writing piece. Some of the strategies you might use with students are below.

Heart Maps

One way to have students to find a topic to write about is to have students to create a heart map which I have talked about in one of my previous blogs. But to summarize that, students draw a heart and inside their heart they put things that are important to them. This can be events, people, thoughts, likes/dislikes, etc. Then, once students have generated some topics in their hearts, they can pick on to write about. For example, one student may put their grandma as a person in their heart map who means a lot to them, so they may say that they want to write about their grandma. However, that is kind of a broad topic because some students may have a lot to write about their grandma, so to help students even more, you may have them create a inverted triangle to narrow it down to one specific thing about their grandma. This strategy is worthwhile because it can get students to generate a lot of ideas and have good things to pull from later on to write about, if they keep this list in their writers notebook, they can continually go back to it for ideas or to add to it as events happen to them or things change.

Inverted Triangle

Once students have a general idea of what they want to write about, they may need help to narrow it down into one specific event or idea. Again if a student wants to write about their grandma, they may have a lot to say, they may want to talk about all the different times they visit their grandma or all the things they have done with her in the past. That is a lot of different things and having students to write all that will be too much and they may miss some details, so we want to get them to really focus in on a topic and one meaningful event or memory with their grandma. The authors in Mentor Texts explain that “We must encourage young writers to uncover the real story they want to tell as they write and stop telling us what we already know or can easily find out about. They must put their writing under a magnifying lens and look for those small moments that can be enlarged to take their readers there, wherever that might be” (Dorfman & Cappelli, 2017, p. 78). So, getting students to take one major idea and narrow it down to something specific allows them to focus on adding in detail and helping their reader to understand and visualize what is happening in their story at that time. The inverted triangle will help with that. At the top of the triangle, students put their idea/topic, which may be grandma. Then, they narrow it down to something more a little more specific, like taking vacations with her. Then, they make it even more specific after that by pulling out another detail like maybe they went on vacation with her to Miami in Florida. Once they have that, they pull one really specific aspect of that to focus on like maybe they got stung by a jelly fish or got to swim with dolphins, etc. By doing this, it helps students to have one specific idea that they can give their readers more information about. See below for my example of something that I would write about with my Nana.

Hand Map

Another strategy that you can have students doing in order to generate some writing topics that will ultimately help them to write a personal narrative would be having them create a hand map. When creating the hand map, students will trace their hand onto a piece of paper and write down five different emotions that they have had throughout their lives. On each finger, students will write a different emotion, then they will write specific events that have happened in their lives to cause that emotion. Once students complete this, they then can take one of these ideas and write about it. This allows them to focus in on one event that has happened, but also allows students to use good descriptive words about how they are feeling. For example, on my hand map, I have overjoyed as one of my emotions and from that I wrote that someone wanted to buy one of my crocheted items from me. This was the first time that had happened, so I can write all about the excitement I had, the butterflies I got in my stomach hoping they would like it, and the sense of relief I had when they said that they loved it and then the happiness I had once they paid me for it. I can write about all these different emotions that I had during that one event and write specifics that led up to the event like how long it took me to make, how difficult it was, what it looked like so that my reader can get a better sense of what I was feeling during that event and the work that I did to create that item. This strategy is useful for students because it allows them to really focus in on their emotions and if they story is strong enough to evoke emotion, then chances are, they will have a lot to write about. Emotion is a very powerful tool with kids, they always want to tell you about how they are feeling or if they had a good or a bad weekend, so having them to focus in on specific events tied to emotion will allow for some strong pieces from students, that will most likely include a lot of detail. They will also be very meaningful to the students because they relate these different emotions to it. Below you can see the example of my hand map.

Neighborhood Map

Another way to get students to start generating topics to write about is to have them create neighborhood maps. By helping them to create these maps, students are able to picture where they grew up and places that are important to them that they could then create one story from. Students start this off with a blank piece of paper and will start to draw the different places in their neighborhood. For me, I like to start with my house and then think about the places that are around my house and then just add them on one at a time as I build up my neighborhood the best I can. Then, after drawing about the neighborhood, students can go back and add labels/captions/thoughts, etc. about the specific places on their map. After this is done, they can pick one of the places or labels to write about and create a piece from. If students just write about their home, there is a lot they can say, but if they zoom into the trampoline in the backyard where they broke their finger on, then they have a small moment story that they can write about. This is a useful strategy to do with students because so much can happen in a neighborhood/ around where a student lives that they may want to write about. I know that different places near my house carry/evoke different emotions in me that I could write about and I could tell someone all about. That is the same for students, being open and sharing your stories with them, can then allow them to feel open to sharing stories with you which will then lead to better writing from students because they will feel more free to write about anything that they want that has happened to them. As a teacher it is important to support students with this and validate their experiences and emotions that they may feel. On my neighborhood map, I noted that a mean lady works in the country club in my neighborhood and I could explain to students why I think that she is mean and my interaction with her, so that they may feel more free to express their emotions/events that they feel are important.

Here you can see a draft of a example of what a lesson using the neighborhood map might look like:

All of these are helping students to become better writers and to help them understand that good writers zoom into one specific story to write about. There are many books out there that would act as great mentor texts to show students the different ways actual authors focused on one story/event and created a whole book about it. Some of these books are listed below:

· Blizzard by John Rocco

· Nana in the City by Lauren Castillo

· Fireflies by Julie Brinckloe

· Jabari Jumps by Gaia Cornwall

· Shortcut Donald Crews

· Layla’s Happiness by Marishadessa Ekere Tallie

· Just Ask by Sonia Sotomayor

· Each Kindness by Jaqueline Woodson

· Janine by Maryann Cocca-Leffler

· Those shoes by Maribeth Boelts

· And many more

Feedback

Not only is it important to help students to come up with writing topics and then to help them to pick one small moment to write about, it is also important to give students feedback. As a teacher you may not be able to give every student feedback every time you have them write, but throughout a week it is important that the teacher try to reach each student to offer comments or question to students work. Teacher should always give students a compliment on what they are doing well. This is very important especially for those students who are hesitant to write or who lack some confidence in their writing abilities. There is always something good that a student is doing that you can comment on and give them praise for. Then, after giving students praise, you may also want to offer a suggestion or question. I like to position these as I am a reading wanting to know more about their work and needing clarification for something. As I am reading a students piece, I may ask questions like:

· How did you feel there?

· What did that look like?

· In what other ways might you describe that?

· What did you mean when you wrote ____?

· Are there any other words you could use for _____?

This is never telling the student that they are doing this, this, and this wrong. It is guiding students for other things to include in their piece and to get them thinking about what extra detail they may need to add to their piece in order to help a reader better understand the point that they are getting across. Students need feedback and suggestions/recommendations in order to know what they are doing well and what they can continue to work on, because unless the teacher or a peer tells them, then they do not know they need to fix it.

Also, it is important for students to be able to work with their peers and to have their peers’ comment on their work. Sometimes it is intimidating having the teacher offering suggestions and reading work that a student did. Also, students know better how to interact with other students and can better give them ideas to write about without the intimidation factor of the teacher and feeling like they are writing wrong because of a suggestion given by a teacher. Having time to let students work with one another is very beneficial and allows for some great conversation. By looking at someone else’s work in the class, a student can gain a better idea for what to include in their own writing and how they can make changes to make it even better.

When having students give feedback to one another, it would be very beneficial to use some guidelines in order to help them give better and more specific comments to their peers. Sometimes when you tell students to give their peer feedback, they do not really know what that means, so it would be helpful to model for them what good feedback looks like and then give them guidelines for what to write about. Two good examples of guidelines that you could give to students can be seen below. Both are awesome because they provide some sentence stems that students could use to give one another feedback and will also help their feedback to be more meaningful by encouraging them to ask questions and off up recommendations for what they could change or add. There would be great anchor charts to have around or for students to have copies at their desks so that when it is time to give feedback they are able to work with another student and have supports for what to say instead of not being entirely sure what to say and just telling the other person they liked it. It provides more in-depth conversations and thoughtful reflection that will in turn make students writing even better.