imaginative writing lesson plan

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Teaching Imaginative Writing

By   Becky F

Imaginative writing is fiction, actually a type of short story. Students are asked to imagine a fantastic situation and write the rest of the story. Depending on the prompt, imaginative writing can discuss anything from space travel to civil rights.

How to Teach Imaginative Writing?

Our Imaginative writing Powerpoint slides included at the end of this post will help a teacher explain how to write a story to her students, keeping in mind all the aspects of writing an imagination.

Moreover, there are a lot of resources available on the internet. My recommendation would be a complete series of videos titled “How to Write an Imaginative Narrative for Kids” by Teaching Without Frills .

Our lesson PPT is a complete lesson on its own. Additionally, you can use some warmup and plenary activities to enhance your lesson further.

Imaginative Writing Activity

One of the classroom activities for this story-writing lesson is to divide the class into groups of four or six, depending on the total number of students. Then give each group one prompt card and a story map to build the first draft by following the steps they learned through this lesson. After the draft is ready, each student can elaborate on the same structure into their own story.

You can watch the lesson preview before downloading the file.

Download ppt Slides For This Lesson

Editable Lesson Slides included

I hope this post is helpful for you to develop and deliver the imaginative writing lesson to your students. You can also check out my other Lessons in Teachers Resources

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Creative Writing in the Natural World: A Framing

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To promote development, detail, and focus of ideas in students' writing, it sometimes helps to start with a fun, creative writing activity that encourages what you want to see in all of their writing. In this minilesson, students practice writing detailed, sensory-rich descriptions by framing a small piece of nature and freewriting about it. From this, students can develop a variety of types of writing including poetry, short stories, science writing, reflections, and other academic genres.

Featured Resources

• Literal vs. Figurative Language Guide
• Internet access and the Flip Book Interactive

From Theory to Practice

This lesson explores figurative language comparisons formally known as simile and metaphor; however, the focus of the lesson is on students' use of their their imaginations to describe their observations in writing rather than on the official terminology for language use. In Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom , author Katie Wood Ray advises, "Give it [the craft element you identify in a text] a name so you can refer to it easily in the future as you study craft and as you writing your own texts"; yet the name that students use need not be the formal, "correct" name (42). The formal name of the element simply detracts from the ways that writers work. As Ray explains, "What's important is that, in seeing it and naming it for yourself, you have a new vision of what's possible when you try to write well" (42). When we do use formal names for craft elements, best practice pairs such words with students' definitions of the elements. Ray and Lisa Cleaveland say, "We are careful to use the words most writers in the world use for the important concepts of writing . . . if we embed kid-friendly explanations of what they mean...we need not shy away from the words themselves" (98). Further Reading

Common Core Standards

This resource has been aligned to the Common Core State Standards for states in which they have been adopted. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, CCSS alignments are forthcoming.

State Standards

This lesson has been aligned to standards in the following states. If a state does not appear in the drop-down, standard alignments are not currently available for that state.

NCTE/IRA National Standards for the English Language Arts

• 5. Students employ a wide range of strategies as they write and use different writing process elements appropriately to communicate with different audiences for a variety of purposes.
• 6. Students apply knowledge of language structure, language conventions (e.g., spelling and punctuation), media techniques, figurative language, and genre to create, critique, and discuss print and nonprint texts.
• 8. Students use a variety of technological and information resources (e.g., libraries, databases, computer networks, video) to gather and synthesize information and to create and communicate knowledge.
• 11. Students participate as knowledgeable, reflective, creative, and critical members of a variety of literacy communities.
• 12. Students use spoken, written, and visual language to accomplish their own purposes (e.g., for learning, enjoyment, persuasion, and the exchange of information).

Materials and Technology

• A piece of loose paper, paper to take notes on, and a writing utensil (pen or pencil)

Preparation

• Scout out a good spot to take students outdoors on the school grounds, a place that preferably has grass or that feels somewhat “natural.” If such an area isn’t available, it is okay to do this activity on constructed spaces such as sidewalks, playgrounds, and even inside the classroom if absolutely necessary, but it’s best done outdoors.
• Prepare the Literal vs. Figurative Language Guide by making it into a transparency or making copies for each student.
• Test out the Flip Book Student Interactive .

Student Objectives

Students will:

• freewrite about a specific place that is framed by their piece of paper using imaginative and literal observations.
• identify nouns in their writing that they would like to focus on and develop further.
• write using specific sensory imagery and figurative language in order to accurately describe their framed “worlds.”

Session One

• Ask students to get out a loose piece of paper.
• Have them fold it in half at least once and tear or cut out the center. (Some students may want to fold it more than once in order to create an unusual shape. That’s okay.) The goal is to be left with a piece of paper with a hole in the middle of it like a frame. The frame can be of any shape or size.
• Explain that you will be taking the class outdoors and that each student will find a spot to place his or her frame. Also explain that students will pretend that what is inside the frame is the entire world, the only thing students will focus on. In their notebooks, students will freewrite about what they find in their frames. Encourage students to use their imaginations. Perhaps they’ll find a bug and write about it as a giant dinosaur or a talking creature. However they proceed, students should write as freely as possible to get as much detailed information down about their framed “worlds” as they can.
• Once students have found a place outdoors for their frames, give them ten to fifteen minutes to freewrite.
• Back inside the classroom, ask students to remind you what a noun is. Ask them why nouns are important in writing. How do they function in a sentence, for example? (One answer is that nouns help us know who or what a sentence is about. They are they focus, and they help us visualize ideas as we talk or write about them in any genre.)
• Have them read over their freewriting and underline three to five nouns that they would like to focus on.
• Collect students' freewriting to be returned in the next session.

Session Two

• Return students' freewriting from the previous session where they had finished by underlining three to five nouns to focus on.
• Ask students to list their five senses. Ask for a volunteer or two to provide one of their nouns. Use these to practice developing these nouns into fully described sensory experiences. Help students describe them using all five senses. Encourage imaginative leaps so students understand that their descriptions don’t have to be literal.
• At this point, discuss the difference between literal and figurative language, and explain that the goal is for students to describe their nouns using sensory detail and figurative language. Show students the Literal vs. Figurative Language Guide overhead or give them the handout. If the students were to write literal descriptions of their framed “worlds,” for example, they will simply write exactly what is in their frames (Grass looks green; sand feels rough; grasshoppers make a high pitched noise, etc.), but if they write figuratively, they will use their imaginations to describe their observations. This might include using similes, metaphors, hyperbole, and personification. For example, the grass looks like spiky green hair; sand is solid water; grasshoppers are fiddlers who play their legs, etc.
• Using the Flip Book Student Interactive , have students create a page for each of the three to five nouns they underlined. (Each student should complete at least three pages.) On each page, they will develop these nouns by adding sensory-rich, figurative descriptions of them in paragraph or poetry form. The goal is to describe each noun using as many of the five senses and as much figurative language as possible. Encourage students to be imaginative for this process. What might an ant sound like? How might a rock smell?
• Students may need to finish their Flip Books outside of class, or you might reserve some class time tomorrow to finish these up.
• Give students the opportunity to share their finished pieces with the class.
• Encourage students to develop their flip book pages further by illustrating them.
• Students might also use an additional page in their flip books to create a piece of writing such as a short story, poem, or reflection about the natural world. Encourage them to find connections between the nouns in their list. How might that list become one piece of writing instead of three to five separate pieces?
• Discuss ways students can use these writing techniques to improve other writing that they are doing. You might ask students to review one of their past writing assignments and underline places where they might add detail or figurative language in order to develop their ideas.

Student Assessment / Reflections

As long as students participate fully in the freewriting activity and complete at least three pages on their Flip Books, they should receive full credit for this activity. If you would like to turn the Flip Book into a graded assignment, you might require that each page include at least three sensory images and one instance of figurative language. Students might also earn credit by reading one of their pages aloud in front of the class.

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Virtual guided learning library, insideout at home was created to help ensure youth, families and educators have access to high-quality, virtual creative writing lessons that engage, inspire, and frame this changing world..

The lessons below are crafted to help students grow creatively and academically, with great attention paid to the Michigan Department of Education standards. These culturally diverse lesson plans address the social and emotional needs of youth, helping them to express their fears, frustrations, and hopes.

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5 Easy Recount Writing Lesson Plans students love.

Our students encounter recounts in many shapes and forms.

From factual recounts in the form of newspaper reports, historical documents, and biographies to imaginative A Day in the Life of- type recounts and recounts based on personal experiences, this is a very diverse text type.

 Luckily, despite the wide variety of recount categories, they each share some standard features that, once learned, our students can confidently produce their own versions of the different recount types.

 In this article, we’ll take a whirlwind trip through all the stages our students need to master to produce a well-written recount.

 You’ll take your students from defining a recount’s purpose through its planning and preparation and on to the writing and final editing process.

 So, without more ado, let’s get started on How to Master Recount Writing in a Single Week .

 RECOUNT WRITING LESSON PLANS

Day 1: the purpose of a recount.

 Before students can begin to produce their own recount texts , they’ll need to have a clear grasp in their minds on the exact purpose of that recount is. This is better demonstrated than explained.

 A fun way to demonstrate the purpose of a recount to your class is to play the game Two Truths and a Lie with them.

 To do this, ask the students to think of two fantastic things they have done. They should write these down secretly on a piece of paper.

 Now, ask the students to make up one thing they haven’t done. They should add this to their secret list too.

 The students then jumble up the order and take turns reading their list to the class. The class must attempt to identify the ‘lie’ by taking a vote a class vote.

 Play this game for a few rounds and then explain to the class that they have just been writing recounts; two are factual, and one is fictional. Inform your students that recounts retell experiences or events from the past.

The Types of Recounts

Recounts come in many different forms. Ask your students to identify as many different types of recounts as possible. If the school library is available, perhaps you could challenge them to browse the texts to identify as many distinct types of recounts as possible.

Alternatively, you could provide a selection of different recount texts for the students to sort and categorize in class. Some common recount types include:

●      Diaries

●      Biographies

●      Autobiographies

●      Letters

●      Trip Reports

●      Historical Reports

●      Newspaper Reports

●      Witness Statements

Spend some time discussing the different purposes of the various texts. Relate the purpose to the title of each text. Generally, a recount’s primary focus is encapsulated in the title, e.g. My First Day at College , An Eventful Trip to Madagascar , An Accident on Highway 6 , etc.

To get some practice at writing titles that sum up the main focus, finish today’s session by asking students to write titles for the two truths and one lie they wrote for the activity earlier. They can share and discuss these at the end.

A COMPLETE UNIT ON TEACHING RECOUNT WRITING

MASTER RECOUNT WRITING  with this complete  EDITABLE UNIT  that ensures your students learn how to retell events with accuracy and energy.   covering  PERSONAL, FACTUAL, LITERARY  and  HISTORICAL RECOUNTS.

Teach your students to write AMAZING RECOUNTS in various styles with this COMPLETE 78 PAGE UNIT . No preparation is required.

Day 2: The Structure of a Recount

Now your students have a clear sense of the purpose of recounts, they’ll need to become thoroughly familiar with the main features and foibles of this text type – and that’s where Day 2 comes in!

Though your students will be aware at this stage that there are many different types of recount, they must understand that a generic structure is underlying all of these.

Essentially, there are four questions that students will need to answer in their recount, no matter what type they’re writing. We can refer to these as The Four Pillars of a Recount . These pillars are:

• Who? Who are the main participants/characters in the recount?
• Where? Where did the events happen?
• When? When did the events happen?
• What? What happened?

One activity that can help get your students to think about these four pillars is organising them into pairs and providing them with some sample texts. They can then work together to identify the answers to the four ‘pillar’ questions. These they can then present to the class.

We can further organize recounts into three main sections:

• The Orientation
• The Conclusion

Writing The Orientation of a Recount

In the orientation or introduction, the student sets the scene for the reader regarding characters, setting, and context. The orientation will provide the reader with all the necessary background details to understand what the recount is about. It answers three of the four pillar questions, e.g., Who? Where? and When ?

Writing The Events within a Recount

In the body paragraphs of a recount, significant events are related in a chronological sequence, that is, in the order they happened. This section, usually the longest of the three sections, answers the fourth pillar question, i.e., why?

Getting students to draw up timelines of recent events in their lives can be a helpful way to illustrate the concept of chronology.

Writing The Conclusion of a Recount

Explain to the students that a recount conclusion comes at the end and usually contains a final evaluative comment on the writer’s thoughts or feelings about the events or experience described. This is where the writer makes any personal comment, opinion, or interpretation of the events.

It can be helpful at this point to ask students to identify where the conclusion begins in several different recount texts by identifying the features of a conclusion as described in the previous paragraph.

You could also encourage the students to write their own brief conclusions for the Two Truths and a Lie paragraphs they wrote in the previous activity, including an evaluative comment on how they think or feel about the event – the two factual ones!

Day 3: The Features of a Recount

So far, our students have been looking at recounts in rather broad strokes. Now, it’s time to drill down in more detail and examine the genre’s specific language features .

Firstly, by its very nature, the events described in a recount have already happened, so the fact that they are written in the past tense should be evident to our students. Once students understand this, it will help them identify the correct verb form for their writing.

To reinforce this, you might give students some photocopies of recounts and ask them to work in small groups to highlight all the verbs in the past tense they can identify.

When writing recounts, verbs are what drive the action. Students should take the time to select the most suitable verb for the job at hand. Thesauruses can be handy tools to help here.

As the students begin to organise the chronology of the events in their recounts, time connectives such as first , then , next, etc., are used to help sequence the text’s body paragraphs.

There are numerous time connectives for students to familiarise themselves with. It’s worth taking the time to brainstorm as many of these as possible, working together as a class. Compile them all into a comprehensive master list of time connectives such as:

•   First
• Finally, etc.

 When the class has done this, they are now perfectly primed to write a paragraph or two relating their experiences from yesterday’s Two Truths and a Lie game in a little more detail and the form of a recount.

 To do this, have the students use the timelines they drew up yesterday and their list of connectives.

 One final language feature for students to consider is their use of nouns. To clarify their writing, students should be as specific as possible when choosing words to identify people, places, times, and events.

 This means opting for proper nouns where at all possible. For example, instead of writing ‘the ocean’, encourage the student to name the ocean, e.g., ‘the Pacific Ocean. Rather than write ‘the girl’, use her name or job title.

 Less obviously, common nouns such as ‘car’ can be replaced by the model (e.g. Ford Focus) and where substitution with particular brand names and models isn’t an option, encourage students to get more specific by adding a few well-chosen adjectives.

CLICK HERE TO SEE OUR FREE RECOUNT WRITING PROMPTS

Day 4: Planning and Preparation

The purpose, structure, and features of the recount are securely in the bag; it’s time for students to plan and prepare to write their own.

You could give your students free rein to write a recount on a topic of their choosing. However, restricting their choice in this instance will provide them with one less thing to focus their energies on, leaving the way clear to focus on the writing alone.

Trips are often a rich vein to tap when it comes to recount writing, and in recent times, virtual trips are all the rage due to the worldwide pandemic. You can find a selection of possibilities for virtual trips on this YouTube playlist here: Virtual Field Trips .

Choose a video suited to your class’s age and ability and your preference of video style – some are text-based, and most have voice-overs. You might even be able to create some cross-curricular links by choosing a topic related to your student’s work in the social sciences, geography, etc.

Students should watch the video carefully, taking lots of notes as they do so as these will form the basis of their recount.

To help students plan their writing, encourage them to use a mind map. One way to organize their mind map is to write the topic of the recount in the centre of the page and then create branches to answer the following questions:

• What happened?
• When did it happen?
• Where did it happen?
• Who was involved?
• Why did it happen?
• How did it happen?

When the students have finished their mind maps, ask a few volunteers to share their work and discuss it as a class. A mind map such as this is a fantastic planning tool that will make the writing process much smoother for the student.

 Once students have completed their mind map, they can then organise their information into the structure of a recount using a graphic organiser using the headings of:

 Now, with prep and planning in hand, it’s on to Day 5 on the road to recount mastery!

Day 5: Extended Writing

In today’s lesson, students will get stuck into writing their recounts in earnest. Make sure you have enough time set aside for them to complete their draft. For older or higher-ability students, this might mean completing the writing at home over the weekend.

To get started, have a quick question and answer session to review the features and structure of a recount orally. If time allows, this might take the form of compiling a checklist of recount criteria on the whiteboard that the students can refer to during the writing process.

 Sometimes it’s a good idea to set a specific time or length limit for the recount, particularly if you want to ensure they complete their piece within a single class. For example, you might inform students that they have 40 minutes to finish their recount or that they MUST finish their recount within a single A4 page.

 Remind students to refer to their mind maps, graphic organisers, and criteria checklist as they write their recounts.

 If they finish early, they should check their work for grammar, sentence structure , and punctuation.

Fine Tuning

On completing the activities above, your students should have a firm, comprehensive grasp of the main elements of recount writing.

 Once your students have woven these elements together to create their own recount, some opportunities should be provided to improve their initial draft. This may take the form of teacher feedback or peer assessment.

 Reinforce to your students that writing isn’t a ‘ one and done’ process. Becoming a master of recount writing will require editing and proofreading to become a crucial part of the process.

RECOUNT WRITING TASKS FOR TEENS

How to Teach Narrative Writing

In this post, I share 5 tips for How to Teach Narrative Writing and provide details about the Narrative Writing Units I have created for Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade students. Be sure to download 3 FREE narrative writing graphic organizers !

As teachers we spend a tremendous amount of time teaching our students to write. And for good reason! The ability to clearly express one’s thoughts in writing is an essential academic and life-skill. Study after study has shown that students who are able to master writing skills early on struggle less in overall literacy and communication .

The Common Core writing domain focuses on three big types of writing: informative, opinion and narrative writing.  Each genre serves a unique purpose and follows a specific structure which we must explicitly teach our students.   

In earlier posts I shared tips and resources for teaching Informative Writing and Opinion Writing .  Today I’m excited to move on to the final genre, Narrative Writing.  

I love to teach narrative writing.  Personal narratives are a great genre to start the year with because they allow you to get to know your students a little bit better.  Most kids love to tell us stories about their lives, so writing personal narratives often comes naturally to them.  

Imaginative narratives, on the other hand, allow students’ creativity to shine!  Many students find it very motivating and engaging to be allowed to write the stories they create in their own mind. 

Today I’m sharing 5 tips for teaching narrative writing, as well as details about my narrative writing resource. It is a writing unit that has everything you need to bring narrative writing into your kindergarten , first grade, or secon d grade literacy centers! 

Tips for Teaching Narrative Writing

1.  read narrative writing mentor texts .

Before you can ask your students to write in a genre that is new to them, you must first immerse them in it.  So to begin your unit, you’ll want to share examples of narrative writing with your students.  These mentor texts provide students with examples of excellent narrative writing. 

As you read them aloud, highlight the way the author structures their writing.  Identify the author’s purpose, the topic, the order of the events, and how the author felt.  All of these things will help students better understand what type of writing we are asking them to do.    

When you’re picking narrative mentor texts to share with your students there are a few things to consider .  First, do you (the educator) think it is excellent?  Second, is it easy for your students to understand?  And finally, is it relevant to the type of writing you are teaching?  If you answer “Yes!” to all three, then you’re good to go!

To help you out I’ve created a list of excellent mentor texts you can use when teaching narrative writing to kindergarten, first, or second grade students.  

A List of Narrative Writing Mentor Texts:

• New Shoes – Chris Raschka
• Jabari Jumps – Gaia Cornwall
• Knuffle Bunny: A Cautionary Tale – Mo Willems
• Library Mouse – Daniel Kirk
• Rocket Writes a Story – Tad Hills
• Diary of a Worm – Doreen Cronin
• The Night I Followed My Dog – Nina Laden
• Rubia and the Three Osos – Susan Middleton Elya
• The Three Snow Bears – Jan Brett

I’ve saved all these titles on one board so you can easily take a closer look at these mentor texts.  Click here to see this list on Amazon .

2.  Model Your Own Narrative Writing

When modeling your own narrative writing I suggest you use an experience you’ve shared as a class.  It could be as simple as a short nature walk outside the school building, a field trip you went on, or a class celebration you had.  Show your students that narratives don’t have to be about big events.  Small moments, like a walk outside, can be stretched out and turned into a great narrative writing piece! 

Next, model how you plan your writing using a graphic organizer.  Highlight how you have a topic, use temporal words to order your events, details and a closing sentence.   Don’t be afraid to put the events out of order!  Let the students catch the mistake and help you fix it!   

Model how you use the graphic organizer to guide you as you write out your full piece. 

Finally, reread your work aloud to ensure it makes sense and that the events are in the correct order.  Check for any silly mistakes and come up with a fitting title! 

3. Use Anchor Charts

You want your students to know that when they write a narrative piece they are writing a story to entertain the reader.  It can be a true, personal story from their life, or an imagined fictional one.  Creating an anchor chart with this information helps to remind students their purpose for writing.

Create a second anchor chart that reviews temporal words.  Words such as yesterday, today, first, next, or last describe time or order of events and help make a narrative story more clear for the reader.  

When writing fictional narratives, an anchor chart of fictional sentence starters can help students to get ideas for a story.  

Finally, you’ll want to create an anchor chart using the writing you model. This will serve as another example of excellent narrative writing.  As a class, add labels to identify the title, the topic, temporal words, details, and the closing sentence in your shared writing.  

All of these anchor charts can be posted in your writing center. Encourage your students to refer back to them and use them as support as they write their own pieces.

4. Allow students to edit and share their writing

Provide a good writers checklist at your writing center.  For narrative writing you’ll want the checklist to include items such,  “Does my writing have a title?”  “Is there a clear beginning, middle, and end?”  “Did I use temporal words?” as well as reminders to check for spelling, capitalization, and punctuation errors.  

You can also create a rubric specific to the genre. Model how you use it to assess your own work and how it can be used to provide feedback to others.   

Give students the opportunity to share their writing with others!  Pair students with partners and let them read their pieces to each other.  Encourage them to provide feedback using the editing checklist and the rubric as a guide.  

5. Provide Daily Opportunities for Students to Write

As with all things, writing takes PRACTICE!  Students need dedicated instructional time to learn the skills and strategies necessary to become effective writers, as well as time to practice what they learn.  

When you think about your daily instructional schedule, make sure you are giving your students ample opportunities to practice their narrative writing through whole group instruction, small groups, and/or through independent practice in writing centers. 

Narrative Writing Units For Kindergarten, First, and Second Grade Students 

Today I’m excited to share with you the details about my Kindergarten Narrative , 1st Grade Narrative , and my 2nd grade Narrative writing units!  I love them because they have ALL the resources you need to give your students the practice needed to master narrative writing.  

These narrative writing units were developed with standards-based research specific to each grade. You can use them within whole class or small group lessons, or as a literacy center activity where students can practice narrative writing independently!  

Let’s take a closer look at each one…. 

Kindergarten Narrative Writing Unit

The kindergarten resource has everything you need to incorporate narrative writing into your literacy centers all year long!  

To help your students better understand the genre you’ll get two mini-lessons , one on personal narratives and the other for imaginative narratives.  I recommend focusing on personal narratives at the start of the year and moving onto imaginative narratives in the second semester.  

You’ll also get a list of suggested mentor texts and online resources, academic vocabulary posters, printable anchor charts, graphic organizers and differentiated writing prompts.  

These seasonal and all-year-long writing prompts come in 3 differentiated versions to meet your Kindergarteners where they are developmentally throughout the year.  Each writing prompt comes with a vocabulary word web to assist young writers in brainstorming ideas and spelling words while writing.

Finally, you’ll get a narrative writing editing checklist appropriate for the kindergarten level. 

First Grade and Second Grade Narrative Writing Units

The first and second grade resources were designed with standards-based research specific to grade.  You’ll get a personal narrative mini-lesson and imaginative narrative mini-lesson to use as a review of the genre.  You’ll also get a list of suggested mentor texts and online resources, academic vocabulary posters, anchor charts, graphic organizers and seasonal writing prompts! 

You won’t hear students say, “I don’t know what to write about!” when they are using this resource!  The seasonal writing prompts include choice boards for personal narratives and imaginative narratives, as well as sentence starters and vocabulary banks to assist in brainstorming ideas and spelling words while writing.

The personal narrative and imaginative narrative seasonal prompts are both PRINTABLE & DIGITAL. The digital version has been PRELOADED for you, with 1 click add them to your Google Drive or upload them to SeeSaw.

Finally, you’ll get self-editing checklists and rubrics for both personal and imaginative narrative writing.  The rubric makes a great self-assessment tool and can be used as a guide for peer feedback.     

I love these resources because they can be used in so many different ways.  They offer opportunities for students to practice both personal and imaginative narrative writing as a whole class, in small groups, as a literacy center activity, for homework, or as a meaningful activity for when they have a substitute teacher!  

FREE Narrative Writing Graphic Organizers

Are you ready to begin teaching Narrative Writing in your classroom? To help get you started, I am happy to offer you 3 FREE narrative writing graphic organizers! You can download them here.

Writing is an essential skill that benefits students well beyond the walls of our classrooms. As teachers, we work hard to plan engaging activities that we hope will build our students’ confidence and help them to develop a lifelong love of writing.

I hope the information and resources I’ve shared on narrative, opinion and informative writing will help to bring stronger instruction and more meaningful writing practice to your kindergarten, first and second grade classrooms!

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Planning Writing Lessons for the Early Elementary Grades

Teachers can provide thoughtful instruction that supports the sustained development of young students’ literacy skills.

Often, attempting to plan effective and purposeful writing instruction raises many questions: What does lesson planning look like? How will I manage so many students who may be in different stages of their writing? How often should they be editing and revising? The list doesn’t stop there.

By utilizing on-demand writing for assessment and long-range writing for scaffolded practice of applying various writing techniques, teachers can approach their instruction with intentional and tailored lessons that meet the needs of the learners in the classroom, as well as help students develop self-regulated behaviors when crafting a piece of text.

On-Demand Writing

Just like any area of instruction, assessment is critical for knowing what the students’ strengths and areas of growth are, and on-demand writing is how teachers can gather that evidence. An on-demand piece of writing simply means that the teacher provides a specific prompt for the student to write to for the purpose of anecdotal data. For example, let’s say a second-grade teacher prepares for a narrative writing cycle. In the first couple of days before the cycle begins, they’ll ask students to write a narrative about something fun they’ve experienced (with their family or a friend). 

After the prompt is given, students get one or two days to write and are provided with all necessary tools to carry out the process of developing a piece of writing without additional modeling or instruction. Effective tools might include graphic organizers, writing paper, tools for editing, and a writing checklist. However, the teacher will not model how to use the tools. The teacher is informally assessing if the students know how to use these resources to develop a story.

After students complete their piece, the teacher collects them for analysis. It is critically important to determine realistic expectations for what writing should look like throughout various points of the year, so creating a common rubric as a grade level is a great way to stay on the same page for analyzing the assessment. 

Writing growth, similar to reading, happens along a continuum of skills. At the beginning of the year, a second grader can’t be expected to write like an end-of-the-year second grader because they haven’t been taught the grade-level skills necessary to do so yet. On-demand benchmark assessments along the way will gradually raise the expectation of what that student should be able to do. Websites such as Reading Rockets and Achieve the Core provide useful anchor examples of real student writing in various genres that provide annotated explanations of students’ overall writing ability and possible next steps for instruction.

As students engage in daily lessons about crafting a narrative within the instructional cycle of a long-range writing piece, another on-demand prompt may be given at the halfway point of the cycle to track growth and drive future instruction. This could be the same prompt as before or a prompt given in response to a story or passage the student has read.  

It’s important to remember that it’s easy to fall into the trap of using writing prompts daily for students to produce writing simply because it’s easy to manage. If we use this approach exclusively, we rob our students of the opportunity to dive deeply into producing self-chosen, elaborate pieces full of voice and author’s craft.

Long-Range Writing

Long-range pieces give students the autonomy to choose their own writing topic while the teacher assists in walking them through the process. This type of instruction instills the executive-functioning behaviors needed when students are asked to write a piece on demand. When considering how to implement this type of writing instruction, it can be overwhelming. Breaking down long-range instruction using the following components allows for a more manageable approach.

Keep your lesson mini: A mini lesson is 15 to 20 minutes long and organized in a gradual release format, and it allows the teacher to model a specific, focused lesson. For example, narrative writing could be broken into the following mini lessons for a beginning-of-the-year cycle for second grade: introduce and describe a setting, introduce and describe the character, edit on the go (this means to stop and edit before we add more writing), describe the first event in the narrative, introduce a problem, etc. Essentially, each lesson will invite students to add to their story one chunk at a time.

Model, provide independent practice: The teacher begins by modeling one learning target using a well-crafted organizer . An effective organizer teaches students that each genre has a specific structure. As learners begin to recognize the pattern in text structure, they can replicate it when assessed in on-demand pieces. For example, the teacher can start by using a text that clearly introduces and describes the setting, and then read that page out loud and ask students what they notice about how the author introduced the setting.  

Next, students are invited to help the teacher write a setting to a story together by offering verbal suggestions. The teacher records the students’ ideas and writes an example introduction in the organizer. Then students think about an idea for an introduction of a setting on their own and are prompted to talk to a partner about their story. The students verbally rehearse what they plan to write, as this provides them an opportunity to organize their thoughts and prepares them to get started as soon as they are released to write independently, using the same organizer that the teacher used to model the mini lesson.  

The benefit of this approach is that it gives the teacher time to provide specific feedback over the same crafting element. Having every student write their complete thoughts directly in the organizer in a chunked manner allows for a better visual of where to correct capitalization and punctuation. Essentially, each lesson should invite students to write one or two complete sentences that can be quickly edited before adding the next part of the story.  

Share and reflect: Close each lesson by bringing students back together so that they have an opportunity to share what they’ve produced. This time celebrates students’ creativity, as well as giving them an opportunity to reflect on how they can improve their writing.   

Both on-demand writing and long-range writing are vital in developing confident writers across various genres. It’s important to approach them with a cyclical scope and sequence that allows students to learn the craft, structure, and development of narrative, informative, and opinion styles of writing. By scaffolding and supporting students’ growth in each genre of writing, learners will begin to automatically apply these techniques more independently as the year progresses because of the solid foundation that has been built. 

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Imaginative Creative Writing Unit 9-1

Subject: English

Age range: 14-16

Resource type: Lesson (complete)

Last updated

22 February 2018

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nataliyamiteva

Excellent resource. Very helpful to teach GCSE students

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mattfarrell96

Excellent SoW - Thank you very much!

Excellent resources - appreciated it very much. Thanks for sharing.

geraldinedaly

Excellent resources - thanks for sharing

sarahdean56

Very accessible for my struggling boys taking gcse for 3rd time!

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