Writing Stories from History guides your students step by step through the process of writing a story that dramatizes a person, an event, or a period from history. Instructions, activities, examples, videos, interactives, and downloads help students gain new story-writing strategies and skills. You can also present this unit right from your interactive whiteboard.
Students begin by picking a historical figure that interests them and listing possible story ideas about the person. Students then read a sample story from history. After responding to the reading, students are ready to write their own stories from history:
- Prewriting activities help students think about people, places, and times in history. Students choose a topic, research it, and use a collection sheet to gather the most important details to use in writing their stories.
- Writing activities help students write a beginning that introduces the people, setting, and event. Students then develop a middle part that uses action and dialogue to show what happened in the story. An ending paragraph brings the historical story to a strong close.
- Revising activities help students build suspense and show instead of tell. Students also learn to get a peer review, and use a checklist to make improvements.
- Editing activities help students hyphenate two-word modifiers and correctly capitalize words used as names. An editing checklist helps students clean up other common errors.
- Publishing activities help students create a clean final copy of their historical stories and reflect on what they have learned.