When teaching narrative writing in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade, there are so many writing skills to cover. They range from creating a sequence of events (beginning, middle, and end) to more difficult

A district-wide unit that affirms the experiences of ELLs while teaching content and developing their language skills. ELLs voices were highlighted through this multi-grade, multi-school unit.

Our principal has really been encouraging us to add more writing into our daily lesson plans. "They should be writing all day long" he tells us. The research is there to back him up. I bumped into this Roll and Retell page from Fun In First on Pinterest awhile back and finally figured out how to add it to our learning day. I printed and laminated four copies of the Roll and Retell page to hand out to each of my four table groups. After a round of Daily 5 I handed them out. I also gave each table one die. Each student at the table took turns rolling the die and then answering the question based on the number they rolled. They each used the individual book they were reading to answer the questions. I felt like it would be a great advertisement for new books for each child to read when they were done with the one they were working on. I also knew it would be great oral practice BEFORE they started writing. Once they had a chance to talk about what they were going to write, I set the timer for 5 minutes and let them write. Then we shared our responses. Here are a few of their responses. I had so much success with this activity with my students, that I created versions that cover the standards for 2nd, 3rd and 4th grades. There are 6 different Roll and Respond Sheets that cover all of the Second Grade ELA Common Core Standards for both literary and informational text. There are 5 different Roll and Respond Sheets that cover all of the Third Grade ELA Common Core Standards for both literary and informational text. There are 7 different Roll and Respond Sheets that cover all of the Fourth Grade ELA Common Core Standards for both literary and informational text. Before you go, head on over to our giveaway page to enter our current giveaway! Every week one lucky winner gets a $25 Teachers pay Teachers gift card! Dr. Susan Hall, literacy leader and founder of 95 Percent Group, mentions this Roll and Retell Activity as a Reading Comprehension Game that Students Will Want to Play Over and Over! Check it out for the other ideas there as well! What have you tried in your classroom lately? Link up with Fourth Grade Flipper for Tried It Tuesday and share! This post contains affiliate links. I earn a small commission each time someone makes a purchase using one of my links, which helps to support the blog. All opinions are my own and I only promote brands and products that I have used myself and truly love. I would love to hear from you! ❤️ Have a question? Idea for a resource you might find helpful? Be so kind and leave a comment below.

Students write a narrative on the topic given. They need to take into account the details in the cue card (who, when, where) and mind the time connectors. I have added some items and problems to give them some ideas. After writing it, they will read aloud in front of their partners.Here you are a listening activity on the same topic: https://en.islcollective.com/resources/printables/worksheets_doc_docx/a_haunted_house_-_listening_and_writing/preintermediate-a2/87405 - ESL worksheets

Do you need help teaching your child how to write a personal narrative essay? Here is a short video that explains an easy way to organize and write a personal narrative essay. The story and worksheets come from the curriculum used at Arden Reading Academy, Step Up to Writing. A personal narrative combines a report with a story. It will have an introduction and a conclusion. The body of the paper would be a story about an event or experience in your life or someone else's life How to organize a personal narrative essay Getting Started Step 1: Choose a personal story to tell. Step 2: Choose a title. Step 3: Use a graphic organizer to organize your thoughts into a beginning, a middle and in end. Step 4: Write the introduction. You need to let the readers know what you plan to explain in a fun and creative way that grabs the reader's attention. Step 5: Write the story. Use your graphic organizer to write a personal narrative about something that has happened to you. Describe what happened in detail and explain how you felt and acted. Step 6: Write the conclusion. You need to remind the readers about your topic and message. This is the last thing your readers will read, so make sure it leaves a lasting impression about the lesson you learned! Sample Personal Narrative Essay Personal Narrative Essay Writing Classes Rancho Santa Margarita, CA Narrative Essay Writing for Kid's 4th-6th Grades This course is intended for elementary students who have mastered the ability to plan and construct a narrative and expository essay with limited instruction. The class motivates young writers by engaging them through the writing process as they answer specific writing prompts. Class Times: Tuesday 2:30 PM Wednesday 3:00 PM Thursday 4:00 PM Class Size: 4-6 Students Class Fee: $70.00 Homeschool Essay Writing for Kids 3rd-6th Grades This course is for homeschooled students needing direction in the writing process. Students will learn how to write a proper response to literature, personal narrative, narrative fiction, and expository essay. They are taken step-by-step through the steps of the writing process (pre-writing, planning, drafting, editing, rewriting, revising) while working on the inclusion of proper syntax, grammar, organization, sequencing, word choice, dialogue, creative introductions, and strong conclusions. Class Times: Tuesday 9:30 AM Wednesday 9:00 AM Friday 10:30 AM Class Size: 4-6 Students Class Fee: $70.00

What is narrative therapy? Find its approach, examples & key concepts.

Resources, tips, and materials to help you, help children with autism

Hi! I've prepared this worksheet to practice narrative tenses. My upper-intermediate students will do it and they'll write they own story by using narrative tenses. Hope you find it useful! Have a terrific day :D - ESL worksheets

Infographic by Global Digital Citizen

We often tell our students that their stories should have a beginning, middle and end, but do they know what that means? In this anchor chart students are taught what is included in the beginning, middle and end of a personal narrative. This anchor chart was created as I was planning the 3rd grade ...

I’m currently researching how to teach (my oldest) the art of conversation. She’s been given the gift of gab. And although I know we can use her ‘power’ for good, it someti…

Looking for 5th grade anchor charts? Try some of these anchor charts in your classroom to promote visual learning with your students.

Children with Autism, emotional disability, or other social deficits struggle with impairments in many areas – relationships, communication skills, emotional regulation, and organization to name a few. This pack contains numerous activities to be used individually or combined to make a survival guide binder for a student with social difficulties. This binder is designed to ...

A short narrative in the present simple, for early readers. Then a True or False activity and a set of questions. Also, a match-up and a short unscramble the words. This is based on a real character! Unscramble is : I am an honest magician - ESL worksheets

In this book I will give you some advice on how to improve your writing, or at least what helps me! I AM NOT AN EXPERT. In fact, I am an amateur, and I would not, by all means call myself a real, greatly-skilled author. But these are the ways that I help myself and I think these ways will help you as well.

Ok, just because I've been gone from 'blogging land' doesn't mean we haven't been working hard in 4B. I've definitely been documenting a lot of what we've been doing! To start, it was clear to me that our old way of peer conferencing just wasn't working. Kids seemed to be goofing around, not really helping each other, and it was a waste of everyone's time. It frustrated me when most of my one-on-one conference time was spent managing unruly PEER conferences. I knew something had to change. I decided to revamp our workshop so that our peer conferences would hold both the author and the peer more accountable AND work on our 6-traits language. I introduced our 'new' method for peer conferencing using this anchor chart to document our process. After students finish drafting, they are to grab a 6-traits peer conferencing sheet and assess themselves by circling all the descriptors for each trait that they feel match their own writing. Mind you, we did a lot of whole-class practice with scoring writing based on the 6-traits criteria so students would feel comfortable doing this process on their own (and being HONEST!). Through our mini-lessons we've learned that it's possible to have high scores in some traits but lower scores in others. That's how we grow! Here you see Devin circling where he thinks his writing falls on our 6-traits rubric. (Note: The link to the 6-traits peer conferencing sheet above will bring you to an even more updated version than the one shown in this blog posting! Just FYI!) Here's another student assessing her own writing after she's drafted. This student has finished assessing her writing using our rubric. She decides on a final number score and circles it to the left of the descriptors. Then it's time to meet with a peer. (We have a peer conference sign-up sheet in our room which helps students know which other students in the room are also ready to peer conference.) Here you see this author reading his story to his peer. After he's done reading, he will explain to his peer the scores he gave himself and why. It's important for the peer to listen carefully to the author because it will soon be her turn to assign a score to this author for each trait . On the lines on the rubric, she will write to explain the scores she gives him. The peer needs to follow the following sentence stems in his/her scoring response: * I give this a writer a ___ because... * This writer needs to work on ... This process requires peers to truly work together, hold each other accountable, and it gets the kids using our 6-traits language a lot more. The second sentence stem helps the writer establish a goal for what to work on when revising! To see more of this peer conferencing process, watch a clip of us practicing this stage! Our focus lately has been on the trait of organization. We've been looking thoroughly at different beginnings and endings of both student and published writing. Here is our anchor chart documenting what we noticed! In other Writer's Workshop news, these are a few additional anchor charts we have in our room to help keep our writing organized. This anchor chart reminds us of powerful words to use to spice up 'said'! In reading we have been working hard on purposeful talk.This is so very important to the social construction of knowledge in any classroom! It's essential to teach students purposeful talk behaviors before even considering literature discussion groups (LDGs). The majority of kids talk like...well, KIDS! So, if we expect kids to talk like mature young people about different texts they read, we need to explicitly teach them how! Talking about Text by Maria Nichols is a great place to start if you're interesting in learning more about purposeful talk behaviors. I taught each of the behaviors individually through two separate mini-lessons - one day to explain 'hearing all voices' in a concrete way (without text), and a second day to practice 'hearing all voices' using text. Then I taught 'saying something meaningful' in a concrete way without using text, and the next day we practiced 'saying something meaningful' using text , and so on. Eventually all of the purposeful talk behaviors kind of blended together and kids started to discover that we often need to use all of these things at the same time in order to truly talk purposefully about anything! We did a lot of practicing, and I've been taping students in this process. Here is a clip of students practicing their behaviors while they talk about their families. (We had read a few books about different kinds of families to foster a safe environment to celebrate the fact that we all have different kinds of families!) We also had students practice their purposeful talk behaviors while discussing their best or worst memory in school (which helped warm up their brains for a timed writing activity we did during writer's workshop). Here is a clip! As a class, we watched these video clips to analyze our body language and other purposeful talk behaviors. I think taping and analyzing is a very effective way for students to learn how they should look and sound in an LDG. 'Keeping the lines of thinking alive' is a tough concept for many youngsters. Sometimes what happens is that students take turns talking, but they don't really build on what the person before them said. In other words, they don't really DISCUSS, they just share and listen. We applauded the first group in this clip because they had good body language and were respectful as listeners, but we discovered their conversation needed to be more 'alive' by asking questions and making connections to each other's ideas and thoughts. Mrs. Pierce and I taped ourselves doing a weak LDG and a strong LDG. As we watched each example, we used dots and lines to 'map out' our conversations (see chart below). In the weak LDG, we discovered Mrs. Pierce and I shared a lot of individual thoughts. The thought started, and then it stopped. There was really no discussion about anything we said; and Mrs. Pierce wasn't even looking at me during part of our time together! How rude! ;) In the strong LDG example, we mapped out a lot of dots and lines that were connected because we took each other's ideas and built on them. We truly discussed the text to dig deeper. We introduced several conversational moves for students to use to help get their voice heard in a conversation. Students also have these conversational moves on a bookmark that they keep in their LDG books. After we learned the respectful ways to speak and act when discussing with others, it was time to teach our kids how to flag their thinking. This is a crucial step to holding a successful literature discussion group because it allows the kids to track their important thoughts while reading so they have ideas for discussion the next day. Here are the 'codes' we use to track our thinking on post-its. We encourage students to use one of our codes to categorize the kind of thought they have and then write a few words to trigger their thought. This helps them when they get into a discussion group; they'll actually have pinpointed ideas to discuss! Students kept a chart in their Thoughtful Logs with all of our codes on it for easy reference. Here's a clip of our students as they practice flagging their thinking for the first time. The next day, students put all their new learning to the test. We put them in small groups to discuss the text "Slower Than the Rest" which is a short realistic fiction story out of Cynthia Rylant's book Every Living Thing. On another day, we used a high-interest two-page non-fiction text about leeches to continue practicing flagging our thoughts. Here's a clip of our kids flagging their thinking just after we modeled it during our mini-lesson. Below are some pictures of the kids' flagged thoughts. In addition to purposeful talk, we've also been studying the historical fiction genre. We've read several mentor texts, including Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner and Dandelions by Eve Bunting. Our first round of literature discussion books are all within the historical fiction genre. Here are a few of our historical fiction LDGs hard at work: Dear Levi: Letters from the Overland Trail Scraps of Time: Abby Takes a Stand The River and the Trace (I think I put my finger over the microphone at minute 2:00!) Oftentimes, historical fiction books will have a flashback in them. One group's book, called A Scrap of Time: Abby Takes a Stand by Patricia McKissick, has a flashback that occurs towards the beginning of the story. I photocopied some of the pages to try to explain this technique during a whole class mini-lesson. In the first section of the book, three grandkids are spending time with their grandma in her attic. They find an old menu and ask their grandma why she saved it. Chapters 1 through 12 flash back to 1960, where 'grandma' is just 10-years-old, living in Nashville, Tennessee at the time of a lot of civil rights protests. The menu is from a restaurant where a lot of sit-ins took place. Through the flashback a reader learns all about life during the 1960s. In the final section of the book, a reader finds him/herself back in the present - in grandma's attic, where the three grandkids ask their grandma some questions about her life during the sixties. There was also another flashback in the story Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner. We also read The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris VanAllsburg as an example of a flashback in a fantasy book! In other reading news, here is a picture of the anchor chart that stored all the non-fiction text features we've learned. In social studies, we've been studying the economy of the five U.S. regions. Students have been reading small sections of non-fiction leveled readers to summarize a product or industry that is important to each region's economy. Students are typing up their summaries and we're calling those summaries 'articles' as they each create a magazine of our economy. Through this project, students have learned to: * Summarize main ideas * Center and left-justify their cursor * Use the tab key to indent * Change font size, color, and style * Bold, underline, and italicize * Safe image searches * Copy and paste * Cite their picture resources Here is the inside of one student's magazine. Next week we will be using this site to create magazine covers! Lastly, we had a chance to meet with our second-grade buddies earlier this month. We split the buddies up into two groups and one group stayed with Mrs. Adams to play holiday bingo. The other group was with me in the computer lab. Buddies used this site to play a variety of math and English games. One of the most popular games to play was called 'Story Plant' where students could click on different leaves to create the beginning to a unique story. Depending on what leaves were clicked, you would get a different combination of characters, settings, problems, etc. The computer generates a beginning to a story that the kids can print off and finish during writer's workshop! Have a wonderful weekend!

This blog post uses An A from Miss Keller as a writing mentor text. It includes a personal narrative checklist anchor chart, a writing lesson and FREE printables!

My best tips for teaching story grammar elements, plus my packet of visual supports and 13 no-prep short stories for story grammar practice.

Check out these teaching materials for upper elementary students including task and reference cards on writing narrative hooks.

Hello and welcome back to this series of “How to Actually Teach Reading Comprehension.” For more topics such as this one, I’d love for you to sign up for my monthly “How to Actually Teach” newsletters found HERE. Today’s topic is all about teaching Main Idea. This tends to be a very difficult topic for students, […]

Ideas and activities for learning, building and writing about landforms. See our imaginary islands and creative narrative writing about landforms.

Posted: July 5, 2017, 10:56am In one of the talks at the TED Radio Hour by Guy Raz, I came across one of the fundamental narrative frameworks that the Cinema industry exploits in their work: The Hero’s Journey. Joseph Campbell, an American Mythologist came up with a pattern of how the typical adventure of an archetype, The Hero, takes place. ... Read More

Classroom tips,teaching ideas, and resources for the upper elementary classroom. Teacher Giveaways

Boost your first grader's reading comprehension by using a story map to outline a story visually.

Hi! I've prepared this worksheet to practice narrative tenses. My upper-intermediate students will do it and they'll write they own story by using narrative tenses. Hope you find it useful! Have a terrific day :D - ESL worksheets