During the month of September our writer's workshop focused on narrative writing. (You can read about how I launched our writer's workshop in my blog post here.) I think the hardest part for me was forcing myself to move onto our next mode of writing when October rolled around. I loved the narrative writing unit and didn't want to stop! They were making so much progress and I had so much more I wanted to show them. However, I forced myself to stick with my plan and we will get to return to narrative writing in December. In all of my years of teaching writing, I was always a bit too nervous to start with narrative writing. I usually started with journal writing or writing to a prompt. But all of my research over the summer proved to be true. Beginning with writing about things that happened to them was the perfect mode to start with.
If you haven't jumped right in like this with both feet, you may be asking how can first graders be writing stories when they can't write in complete sentences? They can't even form all of their letters correctly! What about the spacing and punctuation? Shouldn't we just be instructing how to write one complete sentence before jumping into narrative writing in the first weeks of school?! Giving them sentence starters seems like a more appropriate task right?
Yes, we should be working on letter formation, spacing, and writing a complete sentence with a capital letter to start and end punctuation...BUT, these young writers have stories to tell! We can't wait until all of the mechanics are in order before giving them daily opportunities for authentic writing. (By the way, all of those mechanics make for great mini-lessons.) Just as we don't deny them opportunities to enjoy literature (even though these books are full of unknown words and graphemes they haven't yet mastered). We let them read using the pictures and be captivated by the books we place in their little hands. After all, we are teaching so much more than capitalization, punctuation, adjectives, and narrative writing. We are teaching and instilling a love of writing. Let go a little bit and watch them soar!
Mentor Texts & Mini-Lessons
Like I mentioned in my first post about writer's workshop, the use of mentor texts to teach specific writing traits is one of the ways in which writer's workshop is an improvement over other methods I've used in the past for writing instruction. Below are the mentor texts we used. A couple of the books were used technically during reading instruction. We make sure to coordinate our writing and reading instruction. So while learning to write a narrative with characters and a setting we make sure we are talking about how the author describes characters and settings during our reading instruction. Believe it or not, there are actually many more books that I would like to use but ran out of days!
Great for introducing the concept of what a narrative is.
Good for small moments
Small moments
Small moments
Small moments
Descriptive characters and theme/lesson
Describing characters
Clear beginnings
Fun way to introduce dialogue
Clear beginning, middle, and end
Small moments & clear beginning, middle, end
Small moments
Revision and editing process
I can't express how important and valuable using mentor texts in writing has been for me. If this is something you haven't done before, it does definitely help to have suggestions for certain traits you are teaching. However, if you aren't able to get your hands on a specific book that was recommended, don't be afraid to pull out any familiar narrative from your library and point out what that author did well in their writing. Or if you have an extra few minutes in your day for a read aloud or during your planned read aloud that might not be part of writer's workshop, don't be shy in pointing out a writing trait. It's important to have well-thought out purposeful lessons for this (during writer's workshop), but any additional "mentioning" you can do will give your students even more opportunities to improve as writers. I found that my students were making these reading-writing connections during their independent reading time. They have been shown that we learn to be better writers during our reading. How awesome is that?!
Small Moments
Although this month was filled with many mini-lessons, I know that most of these young first grade writers don't fully grasp those ideas and integrate the traits into their writing. However, every day during the independent writing/conferences block, I would notice a student applying one of the mini-lessons into their writing. It wasn't always on the same day as the mini-lesson was taught and it was never all of the students, but this was something that I was prepared to accept (see my initial writer's post about letting go of some control). So I celebrated whenever I noticed even one student trying out one new trait!Our main goal was for students to truly understand what a narrative is and how to write about small moments. So I made a pretty big deal about our initial small moments lesson. I used Lucy Calkin's watermelon metaphor and we refer to this anchor lesson a lot. So of course I had to bring in a watermelon to make it super concrete! I used the story Wash Day as my mentor text and followed it up the next day using Fireflies. If you aren't familiar with the watermelon metaphor, it's just the idea of teaching students to zoom in from big topics (watermelon stories) to the small moments (seed moments) when choosing a narrative topic.
Listen to this first grader explain it. I swear this was not scripted. She just "got it!" At the end of the lesson, I was trying to have them summarize our learning for writer's workshop and this is what she said. I grabbed my phone and asked her to say it again! Future teacher right?!
At the end of the month we had students look through all of their narratives in their writing folder and select one to publish. We had our first popcorn publishing party!
And as I write this we are well into our next mode of writing: informative (all about) pieces. Our writer's workshop structure of a mini-lesson with mentor text, modeling, writing/conferencing, and sharing is now solid and established. I've always loved informative writing and felt fairly confident with how I have taught it. But I'm always trying to improve and the methods I'm using in writer's workshop is definitely beneficial. I'm looking forward to sharing my experience when we finish up the unit at the end of the month!
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