A Guest Post by Margarita Robledo

W.4.3 Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.

Content Objective: Students generate possible ideas for writing a personal narrative. Students identify the features of a personal narrative.

Language Objective: Students list important moments, events, and people in their lives for their future narratives using a graphic organizer.

Mini-lesson:

• Connection: Turn and talk to your partner and share what you know about personal narratives. Yesterday, we were talking about how writers look for their inspiration to write their stories and books.
• Teaching Point: Today, I am going to teach you how writers get ideas for writing their stories by remembering important moments in their lives.
• Teach: Personal narratives have a clear point of view, usually first person. Most of them are about things that have happened to the author, such as happy moments, sad moments, adventures and more.
• Let’s see how we can use a graphic organizer (see image below) to generate possible ideas for writing a personal narrative. Have students brainstorm some important events in their lives and share out loud. 

• Have students complete the assessment piece (see below).
• Call students back to the carpet. Every student will have the opportunity to share their thoughts and to listen to a partner. Then, they can spontaneously participate in the whole class discussion.

Assessment 2: Today, we will be like the real writers. Let’s brainstorm and complete a graphic organizer about important events, people, places or things in our life. This will lead to future personal narratives. You can include ideas from when you were little, things that you like to share with your family, moments and special people.

• Write one new thing that you learned about a personal narrative.
• Write one example of a topic you would use to write a personal narrative.

Dear Staff,

The 4th Grade is working on writing personal narratives, and we need your help! We would like you to come and share some examples of your personal narratives! If you have time to write one or already have an example of one please bring it. We would love for you to come to our class and read them to the kids. Please print it out and bring it so we can let the kids use it later for ideas. If you would like to participate, we will be working on this during our Writing Workshop time every day from 9:00 to 10:00 or 10:20 to 11:20 during this month.

Please email me and let me know if you can help support us!