Teach your students how to write a personal narrative correctly

This activity will allow students to explore their own memories for potential topics for a personal narrative. 

A personal narrative is an authentic piece of writing that details the events of a life changing memory.  With the implementation of the new Common Core ELA Standards, the ability “to narrate” for an audience is a key component that all students need to master.  Allowing them to write about their own experiences provided motivation, insight, and an authentic audience (their family) to share their writing with. 

Click here to download the free lesson plan

U PLan - Narrative Planning Tool

Planning a narrative can be a difficult task for younger and inexperienced writers.  Narratives allow so much freedom and versatility over other text types that they can become a mess of well meaning ideas if a poorly planned.

This planning tool allows students to work through 8 simple stages to plan a well constructed  narrative including the editing phase. 

It is best suited to elementary / primary students or older writers who have difficulty organising ideas.  Enjoy!

Download the U-planner Here.

Teach your students to write fables with this great tool.

Fables are a great way for young readers to about some of learn life's important lessons.  They are also an excellent opportunity for writers to share important messages that are relevant to them now. 

Last week we used The Fable Planning Tool to construct fables with my grade 6 students, learning about messages, symbolism and even reading some of Aesop's work to learn how to construct a fable that will stand the the test of time. 

The at the end of the week we published our fables as picture story books and read them to our junior school.  The kids loved the process and it was a nice change in their narrative writing schedule at their age.

This planning tool includes a storyboard, examines characters and, setting and includes a large range of morals to get children in the right frame of mind. 

You can download the Fable Planning Tool here.  Enjoy.

* Please note all of our posters are originally designed using high resolution images and fonts at A3 paper size.  Be aware it will be automatically resized to your default paper size when using Adobe Acrobat Reader without any loss of quality.  If you would like to print these documents at larger sizes you can read the Adobe Resize & Scaling FAQ here.

Finally if you would like to purchase a completely editable version of this document to alter without any restrictions you can purchase it for $10.00 simply by emailing us.

Download our free U Plan Narrative Planning Tool

Thanks to Scott at mytopten.com.au for this brilliant planning tool to ensure that students can identify and organise all of the key ingredients required to put together a great narrative.  Download the U-PLanner Here.

Lesson Plan on Writing Great Narratives

I came across this brilliant presentation from Mungo13 about writing Narratives.  There is a great deal of information here on putting quality narratives together for students of all ages.

Writing Narratives

View more presentations from mungo13.

Jenny Eather's Writing Fun - The best place to teach students about writing on the web

As a quick update to this article in 2022. Jenny Eather’s great site has been sold and does not exist as it once did. If you are looking for an equally good alternative, I strongly recommend literacyideas.com. It provides everything writingfun once did and more for free. You will not be disappointed.

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I have been regularly using this site for several years to teach my students about different text types and share examples with them, and I just realised that I do not have it up on Edgalaxy. 

Jenny Eather's Writing Fun is a brilliant tool for any English teacher.  It contains step-by-step instructions on constructing all significant text types, such as persuasive, explanatory, narrative and so on and has loads of examples from students to share on your interactive whiteboard.

It also contains various planning tools and aids to help your students get the most from their writing sessions. Entirely simply, this is my number one pick for writing resources and I strongly recommend you check it out here.

Pic-Lits - Interactive Image and word Bank for creative Writing

What is it?  Pic-Lits is a very simple site that has a bank of images for teachers to use to stimulate different styles of writing as well as a drag and drop bank of words you can select with with your students to describe what is happening in the pictur,e or just associate basic text related to the image.

How can I use this in the Classroom?  Pic-Lits would be great for snapshot writing sessions when you want your students to extend their vocabulary by using nuns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives. Simply show them a picture then as a group select words you would like to see included with a related writing task and let them go to it.  Students could work through this process about 4 times in an hour depending upon their enthusiasm and ability.  Access it here.

Interactive Narratives - The Best kept secret on the Web

I found an absolute pearler today for those love interactive web sites based around learning current events.  Interactive Narratives is a brilliant tool for any teacher to add to their digital toolbox when they want to explain something in detail that offers the reader the opportunity to explore diagrams, videos, games and multimedia associated to the topic to create a collection of evidence on the topic.

Want see and test what actually went wrong with all of those thousands of Toyota's recalled internationally?  See how the Global Financial Crisis is affecting countries differently and take an interactive journey through the Space Race between Russia and the United States.

How can I use this in the Classroom?  Interactive Narratives has a collection of Interactive Specials such as "comparing the ancient Aztec Deities" and "Examining the evidence and aftermath of the murder of young Darisabel Baez." These are brilliant reading activities your students can work on independently to then take to next level as a written report, discussion piece, argumentative essay.  All the facts are presented here in a an unbiased manner leaving it to the audience to draw their own conclusions.  

There is heaps of scope to use Interactive Narratives.  I'd love to hear how you put it to good use.