Classroom Description:

Mrs. Ballard’s first grade classroom is home to twenty-one first grade students. Most of the students are either Native American or Hispanic, with only three Anglo students. We have fourteen girls and seven boys. Most of our kids have a general background, only two of our girls speak Spanish at home. Several are from two single parent households, with about half in a two-parent household. McKinley is a Title I school, located in the center of the Farmington, New Mexico and most of our kids are middle class. 52% of our students are below the poverty line and get free lunch. Our classroom culture is one of respect. If the students can respect the teacher, the teacher respects them.

When you walk into Mrs. Ballard’s classroom you would see a lot of bright colors and smiling faces. The students are arranged into groups of three to four students. Then two groups are pushed together, resulting in six tables and three groups. Each group has a table box/shower caddy to keep their AR book, scissors and pencils in. Each student has a tool box with pencils, crayons, erasers and scissors in them that are stored in their cubby at the back of the room. Mrs. Ballard’s small group table is in back, right side of the room, with her desk on the left. Along the back wall across from the door, she has books on a bookshelf that is organized by level. On top of the bookshelf, each student has a box that has their white board, library books, library folder, and book bag in. All of the bulletin boards have educational material on them such as the 100s chart, routine for reading words posters, what type of problem is it poster and the pull-out schedule. On the same wall as the door, the students have a place to hang their backpacks and coats.

Field Experience:

During the last semester, I have been in Mrs. Ballard’s room for two to three days a week. During the last week of April, I took over the writing center for students to write their own fairytale/narrative story. The first day I started off by reading the children a story about the Easter Bunny in New Mexico, we then followed up by having students tell me the characters, settings and beginning middle and end of the story. We then wrote our own narrative story, creating the main character, the setting and what happens in the story. For the rest of the day, the students were able to play with costumes and props for them to dress up as their character. I took their pictures and printed them for the students to place in their books. For the rest of the week, during journal time, I worked with a small group of students to brainstorm and start to write their stories. Each group got twenty minutes a day with me to work on their stories.

I feel that talking the students through their stories and helping them organize their thoughts are a strength I have in this lesson. I also think that letting them dress up as their own character was another great strength. It really got the students interested in their stories and wanted to work on them. If I could change my lesson plan, I would extend it out two weeks. One week was not nearly enough time for the students to write their stories. After talking to my CT, extending it a week is the route that we are going to take. I would also use the program Bitemoji to create the character with the class. This would serve as the illustrations for the story. I wound up doing this based off the student’s ideas to create illustrations for the story.

Reflection and Analysis:

Teaching narrative is one of the hardest types of writing to write. The other forms of writing taught in first grade are opinion and informative writing. These tend to be easier for students as they get more of a formula for how to write it. Narrative writing is freer and gives them more options.

In order to teacher students how to write their own story, they must first understand the elements of the story. “Student’s first draw from stories they’ve read as they create their own stories, intertwining several story ideas and adapting story elements and genres to meet their own needs. Cairney (Cairney, 1990) found that students weave bits of the stories they’ve read into the stories they write; they share their compositions, and then bits of these way into classmates’ compositions.” (Tompkins, 2016, p. 243). These can be linked by copying the plot of another story and adding new events or characters, retelling a story, or combine several stories into a new story.

The one method to teach students to write their own narratives is to use story innovations. Books that are repetitive in nature are the best that could be used as it is easier to reword it into the student’s own words. Language Arts: Patterns of Practice uses If You Give A Mouse A Cookie (Numeroff, 1985) to illustrate a student rewriting a story. “A first-grade class read If You Give A Mouse A Cookie (Numeroff, 1985) and talked about the circular structure of the story: The story begins with giving a mouse a cookie and ends with the mouse getting a second cookie. Then the first graders wrote stories about what they would do if they were given a cookie” (Tompkins, 2016). Karen Jorgensen, author of the whole story: Crafting fiction in the upper elementary grades, uses what she calls ‘fiction workshops’ with her fifth-grade students. This is when they start to write stories on their own, then have peer review groups and conferences with the teacher. (Jorgensen, 2001)This is similar to what I am doing in my lesson plan.

For my lesson plan, I started the students with the character, then helped them to develop the story from there. The first day that we worked on the story, we did a brainstorming activity where the kids would orally tell me the story, as they are natural story tellers, and I would help them put it into words to write their ideas down on paper. This would be a way for the students to be able to make the story completely their own. “Personal narratives are the first original stories that young children write, in which they tell about memorable experiences and events in their own lives.” (Tompkins, 2016).

Below is an example of a students work so far, including his picture, as well as the PowerPoint version of our class narrative.

Works Cited

Cairney, T. (1990). Intertextuality: Infectious echoes from the past. The Reading Teacher, 478-484.

Jorgensen, K. (2001). The Whole Story: Crafting Fiction in the Upper Elementary Grades. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Numeroff, L. (1985). If you give a mouse a cookie. New York: HarperCollins.

Tompkins, G. E. (2016). Language Arts: Patterns of Practice (Vol. 9th Edition ). California : Pearson.