Personal Narratives and Emotions

It's wonderful to work with such fabulous new teachers! Last week, as we were talking about getting started with personal narratives, Ashley and Melinda suggested that we start with the emotions chart that we've been using in reading.

This makes perfect sense--after all, a personal narrative should be based on strong emotions. And students were already working on using emotion words to explain how characters feel at different parts in a story. So putting together the chart and the personal narratives helps to bridge the reading and the writing quite nicely.

I made this page to help students think about how events in their lives and the emotions that they felt. (If you have plenty of time, you could also have students create a Life Map--always a fun activity! But I'm really feeling the pressure of having only 35 days of instruction left.)

It turned out to be fun and quick way to get kids brainstorming ideas for their personal narratives. After they filled out the chart, they moved around the room to interview each other and share their stories. This helped them to quickly figure out which stories they liked best.

Creating a personal narrative

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Diary of a...

This year, I started off journal writing time by reading Diary of a Worm. This funny book is useful for so many lessons. I used it to show students all of the different things that they can write about in their journals--lists of things they like and dislike, stories about their day, stories of how they have gotten in trouble, and so forth.

About five students in each class took the lesson one step further and started to write their own funny diaries. How fun! Since I'm still observing the students carefully to find out what they are like, I was excited to see them taking off with such a creative kind of writing.

And they had different methods. One student took the picture book and went through it page by page. At first, I was worried that he was copying. Then I saw that he was writing the Diary of a Dragon by looking at what Doreen Cronin wrote in Diary of a Worm, and then trying to think of a similar situation for his dragon. What an interesting writing process!

On the other side of the room, a different student was trying to write the Diary of a Banana. But I could see that he was having some trouble. Instead of using first person point of view, he was writing in third person, and seemed to be struggling to find ideas. This shows me that he's working on using different points of view in writing, but isn't quite sure of how to do it. Perfect for an early teaching point.

Yet another student had started writing Diary of a Bee. She'd filled up half a page, but then seemed stuck. I showed her how to use a field guide to insects to find out more facts about honeybees, facts that she might be able to use to write her funny diary.

I've never had so many fiction pieces so early in the year. Usually, the writing is all personal narratives for the first few weeks as students work through topics related to sports, their summer vacations, and their families. I'm intrigued and excited to see how these students develop!

Planning Personal Narratives: Events and Elaboration

As I said in my previous post, I've been teaching personal narratives for many years. Many kids, of course, will spontaneously fall into writing personal narratives in their journals. As they write about events in their lives, they practice remembering details, explaining events, and using vivid elaboration.

But I'm working toward students writing an "elaborated sequence of events" for next year's PSSA. On that test, they'll need to read a prompt and write a narrative, going through all of the steps of the writing process in isolation on one school day. Whether I like it or not, this is what my young writers must do.

As we work on personal narratives, then, I need to be very explicit with strategies that they can use for the test next year. One great strategy is the graphic organizer called an "Events and Elaboration" chart. It's easy to make, easy to remember, and yields great results.

1. Students choose an event from their lives to write about. I encourage them to choose an event that takes place in a short time frame--one day is great.

2. Students think about the events (what happened) and elaboration for each event. We do a little pantomime for the elaboration--"what you or others thought, felt, heard, saw, or said." (I came up with the pantomime, but not the words. The Events and Elaboration organizer is an old one from the days of the Maryland Functional Writing Test)

3. Students fold a piece of paper into eight boxes. One column is labeled "Events", and the other "Elaboration". As students think about their story, they write the events, and then try to come up with at least three details (elaboration) for each event.

When left to their own devices, students are likely to write a personal narrative that is just a summary of the events. Having an entire column for elaboration reminds them to think about the details. In future lessons, we'll look at adding dialogue, including vivid setting details, and explaining why things happen.

Planning Personal Narratives

I have to admit--I made it through my entire school career without ever once writing a personal narrative. Not once. I filled out the bubbles on the SRA sheets, I answered questions on the lines of my workbook, and I balanced my preferred reading books on my knees under my desk. But I can't remember ever writing a personal narrative.

And this is a shame. As a genre, the personal narrative is a wonderful way for young writers to make sense of their world. There is so much to consider in the writing of a personal narrative. What does the audience know already? What does the audience need to know? Which events are important to explain in detail? Which events can be skipped?

This week, students have been starting to plan their personal narratives. The true power of the personal narrative is to help students look back on events that have happened to them, put those events in context, and figure out the "so what?" Why is this a memorable experience? Why does it stand out in my memory?

I decided that the issue of theme was too important to wait until the end of the writing process. If we think about themes early in the writing process, then students are more likely to weave their themes into their narratives. (That's the hopeful view!)

First, students read the book Those Shoes and talked about the theme. (This is a nice little first-person narrative that tells about a boy who longs for a pair of expensive shoes, but does not get them.)

Then, they looked at a list of themes that I had prepared. It's easier for students to talk about theme when they have a variety of themes in front of them. Here's a link to a version that I put on Slideshare:

Choosing a Theme

Many students easily chose a theme from the list, and explained to their partners why that theme fit their narratives. Some had themes that they wanted to add to the list, which was wonderful! Some students were torn between two themes. In these cases, students decided to either combine both themes into their narratives, or wait until they get into the writing to see which theme is strongest.

In each class, one student shared their story at length so that the class could help them with the theme. Fourth grade narratives are always entertaining! We talked about how sometimes what we think will be boring (a wedding) turns out to be fun...how we can learn from our mistakes (alas, from a poor pet's demise)...and how working together leads to better decisions (choosing a puppy).

I can't wait to see how the narratives turn out. At this point in the process, things look very promising.

Warming up for narratives

It's January, time for my students to move on to working on personal narratives. One problem that I've had when we work on personal narratives is that students fall into a dull, humdrum travelogue: "I went to Hershey Park. I rode on the Comet. It was fun. I rode on the Great Bear. It was fun."

Ugh. So I wondered--how can I help students to see the real value of the personal narrative? How can we take it beyond just a sequence of events and into a story that conveys a theme? And then I thought about it from the student's perspective. We're just moving from working on informational essays. Am I really ready to stand in front of everyone and talk about my deep emotions? Am I ready to reflect on deep experiences and share them with an audience? No! In fact, if I were called on to write about a personal experience, I'd probably fall back on a theme park story too--it's safe and easy.

So we all need to become more comfortable with writing about ourselves. Before we can jump into narratives, we all need to warm up a bit with a smaller piece of writing. I decided to use the book My Great-Aunt Arizona as a mentor text for writing about an important person in our lives. Here's how it has evolved so far:

1. On our first day back from break, we read My Great-Aunt Arizona. The pictures are so rich and detailed that they drew the students right in. Then, I said, "In this book, Gloria Houston writes about a person who is important to her--she says that she her great-aunt travels with her in her mind. We're going to make a mind map to show the people that we carry with us in our minds." (This is adapted from the heart map in the Mentor Texts book by Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli.)

2. I used an old trick for the mind maps. One at a time, students came up to the overhead screen. On a large piece of construction paper, I traced their silhouettes, as outlined against the screen by the overhead projector. Now, this step isn't necessary, and kids could just as easily have drawn a heart or a face themselves. But the silhouettes did add a "wow" factor!

3. Students worked to either write or draw pictures to show the people, places, or animals that are important to them. I didn't give them much direction, as I wanted to see what they would do. Some spontaneously wrote long explanations about why the people were important; others wrote about dogs and cats they had loved and lost; still others wrote about the people they see every day.

4. We reread My Great-Aunt Arizona from a writer's perspective. This time, we were looking for how Gloria Houston used repetitive phrases and ideas, and why she might have chosen to do this. By the end of the book, students were reciting along with the book: "With her long full dresses/and a pretty white apron/High buttoned shoes/and many petticoats, too". They did understand that the author repeated these phrases that she wanted us to remember, and that these helped us to understand more about what Arizona was like.

5. We collected all of the things that we noticed about the author's style on a chart: "We can write like Gloria Houston!" Students mentioned the repetition, the way that she organized the ideas as a story, and the way that she used concrete details to tell us about what Arizona was like.

6. By Friday, students were starting to brainstorm ideas about one person from their mind maps. Next week, we'll expand on these and look at how we want to write them.

I've learned so much about my students as they have worked on this activity...what students like, who is important in their lives, and how they approach writing about themselves. All of these details will only help me to support them as we venture into writing personal narratives in the weeks to come.