I always look forward to my Writers Workshop with my first graders. There is so much we want them to learn, however, we cannot teach all of it to them at once or we will make them hate writing forever. We also cannot expect them to write without equipping them with all the skills needed for a good piece of writing. Overwhelming young writers always puts brakes on their creativity and that is not what we want when we want them to write. As a teacher, it is our responsibility to help model and instruct on how to be better writers. I have compiled these graphic organizers to help make this process easy for you and your students.

WHAT IS A NARRATIVE?

A narrative is a story! Narratives can be fictional or non-fictional and are told in order. Narratives are usually the first kind of writing that students do when they start writing. Narrative writing is usually easy for students because they are writing about themselves and events that have happened to them. 

Here’s what I do when I teach students how to write narratives.

WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT?

Usually, when I start this unit, I provide them with a topic to write about and later, when they are more confident of their writing, I let them choose ideas to write about. For this particular unit, I chose to write a personal narrative about A STORMY DAY since they were learning about tornadoes and hurricanes. 

MENTOR TEXT

It’s always best to use a mentor text whenever you are teaching your students to write any genre of writing. Luckily, we found the perfect book to go with our story topic. We read the book “ The Bears and the Great Big Storm” by Paul Bright which was thoroughly enjoyed by my firsties. I cannot stress enough on how great this book is to teach narrative writing since it had all what I wanted my students to learn. 

LET’S BEGIN THE WRITING PROCESS!!

We started off by choosing what kind of storm to write about. Students had the option to choose from lightning, rain, thunder, or snow storm. 

Next step was to determine the characters and setting for their stories. Who were they with on that stormy day and where were they? 

SHOW, NOT TELL

This skill is really important while teaching students how to write giving descriptive details and our mentor text book really helped us here to enable students to show their readers how severe the storm was and how they felt. Had it not been for this book, my students would not have been able to master this skill. The details they came up with while describing the storm and how they felt were enough to make me burst with pride.

ROCKIN’ BEGINNINGS AND JAMMIN’ CONCLUSIONS

Although you can teach a variety of ways to your students to begin and end their stories, however, I have found that teaching and sticking to one for a while helps students master that style before they can try a different style. We stuck to starting our stories with onomatopoeia which is always a hit and ending them with what they would do next time if there was a storm. 

You can get these graphic organizers at my TpT Store or CLICK HERE.

If you want to check out my post about story starters for Apples Unit, CLICK HERE.