This week I am going to be talking about personal narratives and helping students learn how to write them. Personal narratives focus in on a small moment, it is one even that happens, not an entire day or all the different things you love about your grandma. But it could be one time that you and your grandma went ice skating for the first time. They also tend to be sequenced and have a beginning, a middle and end. Personal narratives zoom into events and stretch them out. It is more that just listing, I got in the car, we drove to the rink, we got our skate, etc. It is adding details and being specific about what is going on: “My grandma whipped the car into the parking lot and hit the curb as we park. We then jumped out of the car and raced to the door; I beat her by about five seconds. I reached for the door and pulled it open with all my strength, it was very heavy. As we walked through the door, the music was so loud when it hit us, we almost fell backwards…” They also have strong emotions, dialogue and a reflective ending. Below is a checklist that you can give to students so that they can see what they need to include in their personal narrative stories, and write about all the things in the last column as a reflection piece after completing a final draft.
Here is another checklist that Lucy Calkins give us in her piece, A guide to the writing workshop, grades 3-5.
Calkins piece is all about helping students to create strong leads in their personal narrative stories. This is an important thing to teach to students and help them to understand because whenever people pick up a book they always look at the front cover and then they open it to read a page or two to see if they will like it. The first few lines of a text really matters if you want to have people to keep reading after the first line or two. To do this, grab a couple of books that students have really enjoyed so far and look at the leads the authors have written for those books. A good one to look at is Charlotte’s Web, but there are plenty out there that would be great to use in your class. It is important to also help students understand writing leads and get access to different ways authors have done them because starting a story can be hard. I know when I start to write I sometimes get overwhelmed with the best way to start my piece and will often get very anxious because of this. Then, I will take a break and have a hard time to get back to my writing to start my piece because I just do not know how where to start.
Calkins writes, “In this session, I help students gather their courage and take the plunge; I try to make it less frightening to get started on a draft by encouraging children to expect revision. They don’t pick up the pen and write the lead. Instead, they write several possible leads, then choose one.” She also goes on to talk about how writing is pliable, it does not have to stay the exact same once you write it. This is important for students to understand because I think sometimes, we like to make things perfect the first time, instead of just writing to get ideas down on paper and then go back to fix some. I know I find myself doing this, I want to see how things fit together correctly the first time and often have a hard time sometimes going back and rewriting/editing my pieces. However, good writers will get their ideas down on paper and then will go back later on to edit many different times, tweaking the writing so that it is perfect, and then sometimes their work is published and they still look back at it wishing they could change some things.
Dorfman and Cappelli also talk a lot about the importance of a lead in writing in chapter five of Mentor Texts. They write, “The important thing about beginnings is that students have choice. There are many ways to craft a goof beginning or narratives and informational pieces” (2017, p. 123). They off up a whole list of different ways to show to students how to create a lead, the list they create can be seen below:
I also really liked Calkins idea of looking at what other authors have down in their books and pulling from that in their own writing. I have heard so many times in school that you should use your own ideas and that you can’t just copy someone else’s. I feel like that causes students sometimes to tense up at using an idea someone else has because they do not want to copy. I know that in my own class with kindergarteners, I will model something on the board for writing and they will get stuck somewhere when they are writing on their own and I will encourage them to look back at mine and see what I did and pull ideas from there and they will tell me that they can’t because they don’t want to copy me. I try to encourage them that it is okay to get some ideas from my own writing if it helps them. Slowly I think that they are starting to realize that they can use some of the ideas I have and change them up a little to use in their own writing. It is kind of awesome to look back at their hesitation at the beginning when writing with them, to now them telling me, “look Ms. Hamilton, I did ______ in my writing just like you did in yours.” This may be anything from labeling pictures, to writing about a pet, or using an exclamation mark (they love using and finding exclamation marks, they think that they are so awesome).
One thing that Calkins wrote that really resonated with me was, “Cynthia Rylant once said, ‘I learned how to write from writers. I didn’t know any personally. But I read.’ She is not alone. The writers we love will all agree that they learned to write from authors.” Then she encouraged her own students to read books they love for homework and mark places in them where they would like to try a technique an author used. She also said that students need to be introduced to many different kinds of leads so that they can pull from different kinds in their own writing. I loved that she suggested having like a lead writing gallery walk around the room. For this, students would open up their notebooks where they used a lead they like and there would be some out on the desks for students to walk around and read. You may need to pull in extra if there is not a variety of different leads in student work. It could just be a day full of just looking at different leads used by different people. This could be especially impactful to see student examples because it may be more relatable to them rather than reading someone’s piece who is not their age and they don’t know.
Not only is it important to start with a strong lead in a small moments story, but it is important to remember to show not tell throughout the story. Readers don’t want to read a list of things that you are telling them about like I was excited when I got a new puppy. To a reader that may not be as exciting as, I screamed and jumped up and down ten times when I saw my mom walk in with a puppy who was so fluffy and all black except for a little white on his feet. Now, the reader can visualize more of what is going on in the story that goes beyond someone just writing about they were excited. Below is an anchor chart that would be good for a teacher to hang up in their classroom so that students can remember to show and not tell in their writing. It also has some suggestions underneath for how they might do that. Instead of using these on this list, it could be good to create it as a class and have students generate ideas for showing and not telling about these different emotions or feeling that are more relatable to them.
Six-Word Memoir
Another thing that you could have students to do is having them create a six-word memoir. This is good for students because they have to think about and choose their six words very carefully and strategically. Also, one teacher has her students do this and them publishes them online to share with the rest of the class and with the parents. It is showing students that writing is meaningful and that people will actually read and react to their work. This in turn makes them a little more excited and motivated to write and gives them purpose when they actually have readers. That is the entire goal of having students write, we want them to be better writers, but they are not just going to become better writers just because we want them to. They are going to become better writers by having purpose and having someone, besides just the teacher to read their writing. By giving students purpose to write, a lot of them are going to excel and want to learn more or try harder because they want their readers to learn more and will do better for them. I am even seeing this with my reluctant writers in kindergarten. I have students writing and once they finish, they are so eager to share their stories with me and the other kindergarten teachers. I make a huge deal out of their writing, I have them read it to me and I do a little happy dance and tell them all the things I love about their work, plus a challenge if we have time for it. One time I got a little distracted and did not do a little dance after reading a student’s work and they said, “Um Ms. Hamilton, you forgot the dance.” It is little things like that, that will motivate the students and will make them want to write.
Here you can see my six-word memoir:
If you click here, you can see find a link of other student work.
Your Turn Lessons
Additional for this week, I created two different lessons that teachers can follow to help students come up with ideas to write about. The first lesson was about What Ifs and having students writing all about their different wonders. The second lesson was about creating heart maps and using them to help write personal narratives. Below you can find links to the documents.
Resources:
Calkins, L. M. (2006). A guide to the writing workshop, grades 3-5. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Dorfman, L.R. & Cappelli, R. (2017). Mentor texts teaching writing through children's literature, K-6. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
Saunders, J., & Smith, E. (2014). Every word is on trial: Six-word memoirs in the classroom. The Reading Teacher, 67 (8), 600-605.