Personal Narrative

The writing unit I am teaching in my classroom is focused on personal narratives. They have been learning what a personal narrative is, how to brainstorm ideas for their personal narrative paragraph, and how to plan a rough draft using a graphic organizer. We still have revising, editing and publishing left to do. Once they are done with their publishing we will engage in a sharing session that will be focused on receiving positive feedback and allowing others students to better know each other. The lesson I will focus on for this post is the lesson I taught which introduced the students to personal narratives.

1) Short term learning target:
Given the word two different genres of text students will find the differences and similarities between the two forms using a Venn diagram.

Given the genre “personal narrative,” students will help create a definition of the word by reporting their findings.

(2) Evidence:
I knew the students were successful through a Venn diagram comparing a personal narrative and an expository text, and through a class wide creation of a definition for "personal narrative." Some of the realizations that students made in the Venn diagram were that personal narratives describe an "experience," "what happened to the narrator really happened," "the (personal narrative) was emotional," and "it is first person." These are actual statements from the students that they noted in their Venn diagrams. This told me that a large majority of the students were grasping elements of a personal narrative. When we were done with this activity we closed by creating a student led definition of "personal narrative."
In groups they came up with ideas and shared; this is what they came up with:
· Usually true
· Meant to entertain
· Sort of like a personal biography, journal, diary
· First person
· An event from your life
· Tells the feelings

3) Reteach:
If I were to reteach for those who do not understand fully, I would bring in additional texts that would only be focused on personal narratives. Comparing two types of texts is a good idea, but it can lead to confusion if students begin to mentally combine the elements of the two types of texts. I feel that immersing the students in personal narratives that are at their reading level would solidify their understanding of what a personal narrative should sound and feel like.

(4) Extend:
I think that students who have successfully met my expectations would benefit even further by finding personal narrative examples in the world outside of school. I would look for three examples that students would find and bring into the class. The examples would have to differ from each other (for example, I would not want three emails as example, maybe an email, a letter, and a news paper clipping). I would also have them justify how their personal narrative examples come to be labeled a personal narrative.