Personal Narrative Writers Workshop
This is one of several posts on teaching writers a particular mode and genre. In this post, I focus on the personal narrative, specifically in prose. A personal narrative is a story, but it can take the form of a photo collage or a graphic memoir or even a narrative poem or personal narrative in verse. (Note: These tutorials are very short and not meant to be comprehensive. I hope you are inspired to do further inquiry and reach out if you’d like to learn about more resources and discuss how to implement writers workshop.)
This is a 3 part tutorial on the personal narrative in prose.
Part 1 is a brief overview of a short personal narrative unit that begins, as all of these tutorials will, with mentor texts.
Part 2 is gathering ideas from students’ notebooks and heartmaps for their personal narratives but also offering specific memory topics that lend themselves to personal narratives.
Finally, Part 3 is support for teachers in modeling their own writing process with and alongside students.
These three parts get you to the drafting/revising, so then you can turn to the broader workshop tutorials for the next processes such as peer revision, grammar mini-lessons in-context, grading with standards, and the publication party! Check out those videos when you are ready.
Here are the slides to support your journey.
Here is a draft of my personal narrative.
Here is a variation on the personal narrative, which is a biographical narrative. Students exchange stories to write a third person narrative about a classmate’s memory.