Our county decided to adopt the Units of Study for this school year, so last year all of us 5th grade teachers got to go to a training once a month (woohoo!) that was focused on using the scoring rubrics to analyze student work, plan strategy groups, and teach writing to small groups based on their needs. Units of study pretty much encourages you to teach writing the same way you teach reading - a quick mini-lesson followed by independent work while the teacher works with small groups and/or confers with individual writers.
When we first started going to the trainings a lot of us were overwhelmed and thought there was no way we would be able to make time for this writing workshop on top of teaching reading comprehension, vocabulary, word study, etc... I have to say though, I have been following these lessons day by day and I am SO happy with the results I have gotten. I've never seen 5th graders write so much and enjoy it!
One thing I love about this program is that you are supposed to give an on-demand assessment at the beginning of each unit to see what your students already know before you dive into the mini-lessons. Although these do take quite a while to score, when they completed their first personal narrative after two weeks of lessons and I was able to compare them to their on-demands, I was so impressed by how much my kids had improved.
Anyway, as we were going through, I started to create a few resources that I thought would be helpful for me and my students and I thought I'd share them with you in case you are about to embark on teaching personal narratives! :)
I wanted to be able to monitor each student's progress throughout this unit without having to open their folders and take out their writing and check scores every time, so I created this easy form to keep track.
One day, I was looking for my notes for the mini-lesson and a poster that I wanted to share with them and a mentor text and I could not remember where I had put each of those things, so I realized it was time to get more organized. I created a binder with all the resources I needed to grab and use during writing time.
In the binder I have a copy of the Personal Narrative rubric, a copy of my plans for each and every lesson, and copies of mentor texts that I will read to them.
Speaking of mentor texts, whether or not you are using the Units of Study, I absolutely recommend using Eleven by Sandra Cisneros to model personal narrative writing. It is such a powerful story! It's so well written that you really feel like you are there in the classroom with poor Rachel as her birthday is ruined. Seriously, read it to your class...read it for fun...read it however you want. It's amazing! Plus, she includes so many elements of narrative writing that we want our students to use!
(Our writing curriculum came with a copy of this passage but you can just google the title and find multiple PDF copies of it online!)
Once we went through the first bend of this unit I decided to take a break from the daily lessons and go through the Personal Narrative Writing checklist one feature at a time. I created these posters so that we could quickly refer to them and see what is expected in each category in order for our writing to meet the Fifth Grade level expectations.
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