Narrative Writing: Day 1

Day 1

I was nervous. For the last 3 weeks, I have been thinking about how this writing workshop was going to look like in my classroom. I had seen pictures and videos of other writing workshops. I had read books, articles, and blogs about writing workshops. But I wanted to make this my own. I think I kept thinking about writing. Author's make writing their own; they add their own voice. I wanted my writing workshop to have it's own voice.

We begun the lesson with meeting at the carpet in front of a mostly blank piece of chart paper.
(I say mostly blank because I had lightly sketched the narrative anchor chart on it. This was a tip I learned from a professor in my Master's program so then you can make it look sort-of neat while you are making it...)

We had a brief discussion about there being different types of writing. I explained that we were going to start narrative writing. When I ask what narrative writing was, most of the responses were

"Where you write something light and then trace it?"

I guess I didn't write the anchor chart lite enough because the kids could obviously see my pencil marks... oh well

I explained that narrative writing was where you tell about an event (like 4th of July), tell about a personal experience (having fun with my newborn, baby E) or telling a story.

Each narrative needs three parts, the beginning, the middle and the end.

Next, I gave the students an example of telling about an event. It went something like this:

I went to a party. There was food. I went home. The end.

I know, great huh?

I asked the kids what they thought and they all decided they didn't like it, even thought it had a beginning, middle, end. They came to the conclusion it needed more details.

We then had a brief discussion about what kind of details we can add. I did not write the "words create pictures" part on day 1. I wanted to save it for day 2 and allow the kids some time to write.
SO we begun to write.

Again, I was nervous. Would they want to write? Would they complain? Would they stage a coo? (Ok, a little dramatic).

And I'm happy to say, it went fairly well. Most of the kids wanted to write and they wrote. I had two red (well maybe yellow) flags that I say:

(1) One little boy stared at his paper for the full 15 minutes and couldn't write
(2) A few wrote two sentences and then wanted to draw a picture. When asking if they could go and add some more details, they said no they just wanted to draw the picture..... (eekkk.. did my long term sub have them draw more than write??)