Writing Personal Narratives helps your students select an interesting experience from their lives and develop an effective narrative essay about it. Instructions, activities, examples, 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 analyzing the sensory details in a paragraph and creating a sensory chart about their own experiences. Then students 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 show instead of tell and use specific verbs, as well as incorporating ideas from a peer review.
- Editing activities help students correctly use quotation marks with dialogue and correct comma splices and run-on sentences.
- Publishing activities help students create a clean final copy of their personal narratives and reflect on what they have learned.