Personal Narrative

After sharing with all of you about personal narratives at our parent teacher conference, I thought I would write a quick post including some of the anchor charts we have used to help guide our personal narrative writings.
A personal narrative story focuses on an important small moment in time.  A great personal narrative follows the story arch of having a beginning that hooks the reader, a rising action, the climax (which is the small moment), the falling action, and an ending that wraps the entire story up.  As you begin to see writing come home, please take the time to read your child's work and help them be a good critic of their own writing.

Sincerely,
Mrs. Monk

Here is a snapshot of some of the leads the students are using.  The beginning of our story is the perfect place to hook the reader.  It is so important that students have a lead that draws the reader into their story.

Here are some of the characteristics of a strong personal narrative.  Following the story arch allows students to make sure they have every component of a personal narrative. 

Students sometimes have a hard time narrowing down a topic to a small moment.  Students tend to want to write about an entire vacation or event.  We use the illustration of a watermelon story to help students narrow their focus.  We want to take a slice from the watermelon, and then we want to choose just 1 seed from that slice to write about.  This helps our story stay focused and can really allow students to elaborate on a moment versus telling a lot of surface facts.