This fall my forth graders were working on narrative writing. Our first attempt was horrible left lots of room for improvement. The mistake was mostly on my part. I made this huge assignment to grade without giving them sufficient practice first. Since then I have been looking for ways to give them more practice at writing a narrative in a variety of meaningful ways.
In fourth grade state history is the majority of our social studies time. We were covering the daily life of a typical Native American living in Idaho. I wanted to start talking about voice, first person, third person etc. I told them they would need to write a narrative with all of the common core components in first person teaching the reader about the daily life of a Native American. I wasn’t sure how the assignment would go and I expected some eye rolling when I explained it. To my surprise, they loved it! A teacher’s dream come true!
There are two reasons I think it went so well.
1. The boys began to write wonderfully imaginative stories about going on adventurous hunts with wild animals since that was how Native Americans obtained the majority of their food.
2. I promised a project for those that were done. They were to make an artifact from daily life. A tepee, long house, model of a village, hieroglyph, clothing, anything they could think of.
I did encounter one interesting dilemma with the girls. They too wrote amazing stories about an adventurous hunt. I had to remind them that girls did not hunt and tell them their options were to either be a boy in the story, (they did not like that) or change their story (they didn’t like that either.) We ended up with a compromise where they had to add in that they were sneaking out to hunt and explain that normally girls did not do this.
Overall it was a great way to practice narrative writing and first person and I know the kids really enjoyed it!
No comments :
Post a Comment