Writing Personal Narratives guides your students step by step through the process of writing an essay about an experience they have had. Instructions, activities, examples, videos, interactives, and downloads help students gain new writing strategies and skills. You can also present this unit right from your interactive whiteboard.
First students warm up by thinking about an important experience by using a 5 W's memory chart. Then they read a sample narrative paragraph and a personal narrative essay. After responding to the reading, students are ready to write their own personal narratives:
- Prewriting activities help students choose a topic to write about, gather details about it, and organize them as they prepare to write.
- Writing activities help students write an opening that draws the reader into the narrative and introduces the people, setting, and situation. Students develop a middle part that uses action and dialogue to show what happened in the narrative. A closing paragraph brings the personal narrative to a strong close.
- Revising activities help students add sensory details and dialogue to their drafts and use a checklist to make improvements.
- Editing activities help students correctly use quotation marks with dialogue and check verb tenses for consistency.
- Publishing activities help students create a clean final copy of their personal narratives and reflect on what they have learned.