April 29th
Pre-Work Instructions
Pre-Work
We are asking you to do two things for pre-work:
Watch the short video on why we teach narrative writing.
Please complete the sections "Identity Mapping" and "Story Mapping" on the linked Personal Narrative Task page.
Please complete prior the start of our meeting at 6:00 pm on April 29th.
Why Narrative Writing?
Why Focus on Narrative Writing?
Before engaging in your pre-work, please watch the linked video about why narrative writing is improtant for our students.
Additional resources (you do not have to read these for your pre-work - they are here for reference).
?Can I Write About What Happened To Me??.pdfNewkirk chapt 3.pdfThomas Newkirk (2014)
Personal Narrative Task
Pre-Work: Pre-Writing
Please click the image to the left to be taken to the pre-work for our narrative writing task.
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Teaching Resources
The below resources are meant as a suggestion of a mini-lesson that you might do with students as they revise their narratives for content. Remember, feedback and revision should initially focus on content. Editing for spelling, grammar, and punctuation should be the final polish that students put on their essays.
Cracking Open a Narrative - revising scenes for detail
Roorbach_crack open.pdfBill Rohrboch on Cracking Open writing
This is an additional resource for teachers on "cracking open"
Additional Resources
Craft Esssay: "House as Home: Writing the Places That Raised Us"
The article linked to the left is part of Brevity magazine's May 2021 edition. In it, Beth Kephart writes about locating and describing yourself in your childhood neighborhood. Her examples might be useful in thinking about different ways that students can describe their surroundings.
Black Imagination_Excerpt.pdfExcerpt from Black Imagination
These excerpts from the anthology Black Imagination: Black Voices on Black Futures curated by Natasha Marin, could serve as craft texts, that is, texts that students read to discuss how each author worked as a writer to help the reader understand his or her story.
They might also serve as texts that could be used for write likes. Students could select a few lines that they found interesting, unique, or where they found themselves stopping because something about the lines struck them. Students could then write about what the author is doing in those lines and then work to revise their own writing to mimic the lines from the text.
Bridge to Practice
For your bridge to practice, we'd like to ask you to select what you'd like to work on.
We'd like you to continue to use a high-level comprehension task, a quick write to essay task, or an analysis task as a Test of Change.
Try out a narrative writing task with your students.
To complete this bridge to practice, do the following:
Continue to work with your improvement team to draft a high-level task in response to the next text that you'll be working with in the curriculum. If you need support working as a team to plan the task, this document might serve as a useful resource for text-based work. Remember, even if you are planning for an analysis task, you should still begin with comprehension.
If you want to work on a writing task, use the sample documents provided during today's work as templates for creating a task for your students. Please remember to create a copy of the Google Docs before you begin to edit them.
Then, work with your school improvement team to decide how you’ll study the enactment of the task (will you look at student work? Will you use exit slips?).
Finally, use your task with students and then come back together with your improvement team to decide next steps (Adapt, Adopt, Abandon!).
Coordinators, we will see you in May! Full school teams, we will see you again in June!