Home Learning Fun With Narrative Writing

I've been experimenting with my writing programme this year. Term one has thus far been about getting to know the students as writers and presenting them with a range of writing activities designed to both engage them and explore the process of writing. Kids are often hungry for opportunities to do narrative writing, but this genre is difficult to teach and often students produce results that are not as strong as in other genres. The reasons that I can see for this are twofold: 

• Firstly, the story has no plot and just carries on until the author decides that they have produced enough pages and decides to stop. 
• Secondly, the author tells you what is happening the whole time rather that showing you what is happening. E.g, Telling you what is happening = Bob woke up... Showing you what is happening = Beep, beep, beep, the clock showed 6.30 am. Bob's eyes slowly opened...

The video below will help with descriptive language to a degree, but mostly deals with a great way to help students plan the plot to their narrative. The key is to have each box depict a new event in their story and not include too many boxes. In my experience, at this level, if you include more than 6 boxes the story gets too complex and the students aren't able to hold it together. The first box should set the scene (check out this lesson for another idea around that) and the final box should resolve the problem in the narrative in some way. I always say that no teacher or parent wants to read a narrative that ends with "and then I woke up" or "and the he/she died". Those two endings are the classic go-to endings for children's narratives and all the students in my class are far more creative than that!

I recommend sitting down with your child and doing a story board together (this takes a maximum of 10 minutes for me in class, but may initially take you longer). They can then do a draft of the story independently. This is often quite short and includes 1-2 sentences per main story event. Don't be disappointed - this is normal. The next thing is to choose 2 parts of the story to describe in more detail (showing, not telling). If they take on your feedback and add some detail you've been super successful. You can then get them to proofread for spelling and punctuation. After that get them to add in some visuals and publish. Publishing ideas include: reading the story aloud and recording it, creating a pocked book, writing the story neatly onto piece of paper, typing it into computer, drawing illustrations to go with the words or making a comic strip.