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If Then... Realistic Fiction Unit--Returning to Narrative Writing
If Then... Realistic Fiction Unit--Returning to Narrative Writing
This unit is used during the year to help students revisit the narrative writing skills that they practiced at the beginning of the school year. As it is generally a 2-3 week unit, it can be tucked into the school year as needed. Typically this until will occur toward the end of the 2nd Trimester and Beginning of 3rd trimester.
Depending on time, students may do all 3 Bends or only one or two bends. As these are optional units that are reviewing skills given in the Personal Narrative Unit and in earlier grades, utilizing one unit versus all of them, so not necessarily hinder the students.
We call these "trouble stories." We focus on students using their own lives as inspiration. This allows the student to create a story that may turn out differently from when it happened to them.
Bend 1: Writing and Revising True Trouble Stories
Bend 1: Writing and Revising True Trouble Stories
Bend 1 focuses on trying out story ideas and drafting a series of ideas to choose from. We use the following "notebook" style entries to get our ideas on paper, before the nightly writing goal of trying to write 2 pages of a scene for a story. By the end of the bend, we get somewhere around 3 stories started. There are 4 lessons in this bend before we flashdraft the story. With the 4th lesson, I allow the students to add on another 2 page scene to one of their story ideas.
Flashdraft time
Flashdraft time
Unlike previous flash drafts, I allow the students to take the two scenes that they have written and add them to their flash draft. They can take as much or as little from the original documents for their flash draft. This helps the students be able to focus solely on the last scene of their story and try to draft a full story in the time they have.
Bend 2: Writing a Short Fiction Stories
Bend 2: Writing a Short Fiction Stories
In this Bend, I allowed the students to go back to their flashdraft and take any of all of their previous story. This bend focused on returning to those different parts of the story they had written and use revision strategies. There were 4 lessons in this bend as well. We focused nightly work on revising the 3 different sections of our writing and showed that with the different colors on our Google Documents.
The 4 Stars of Revising
The 4 Stars of Revising
Narrative Writing Checklist--Our Goals for the Unit
Narrative Writing Checklist--Our Goals for the Unit
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