Personal Narrative Writing Supplementary Resources

These personal narrative writing activities are designed to help your students focus on small moments and generate detailed compositions. Four learning activities help students solidify their understanding of what a small moment is, generate high-quality ideas for a variety of writing prompts, and begin writing using graphic organizers.

Designed to supplement your elementary personal narrative unit, these activities purposefully build your students skills for writing strong, focused personal narratives through scaffolding.

This unit has been designed to include research-based practices that support learning including:

• Examples and non-examples
• Graphic Organizers
• Tiered assignments/tasks

Included Activities

1. Identifying Small Moments Concept Refinement Sorts: Students sort task cards in partners or as a group to help solidify what a small moment is and isn't.
2. Building an Idea Bank: Guided graphic organizers allow students to move from sorting to generating their own ideas for personal narratives. In partners students then work to determine whether their ideas were small moments or big events.
3. Refining to Add Details: This activity allows students to use sketches and phrases to help replay a selected small moment in their mind. Students use their visualization to create a story map that helps them draft.
4. Differentiated Personal Narrative Writing Prompts: These prompts are designed to help prepare students to write to a given directive. With two versions for each prompt (one with scaffolds and one without), you can select the best option to individualize for your students.

Writing Skills & Topics Covered:

✔ Defining "small moments" and why they matter in personal narrative writing

✔ Identifying examples and nonexamples of small moments

✔ Generating a list of small moments from life and selecting one to write about

✔ Storyboarding and creating a cohesive draft

✔ Adding descriptive detail to create a vivid visualization for the reader

✔ Staying on topic when writing to a given prompt

Download the preview for a closer look, or read more about how I use this product with my personal narrative unit here.

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Terms of Use:

© Rebecca Davies. All rights reserved by author. These materials are intended for personal use by a single classroom only. Copying for more than one teacher, classroom, department, school, or school system is prohibited. For use in multiple classrooms, please purchase additional licenses. This product may not be distributed or displayed digitally for public view. Failure to comply is a copyright infringement and a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Clipart and elements found in this PDF are copyrighted and cannot be extracted and used outside of this file without permission or license. See product file for clip art and font credits.

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