Curated OER
Writing Short Stories: The Fun Way
Do your young authors suffer from writer's block when they try to write short stories? Access their natural creativity with C-Gor, the writing monster! The instructional activity takes aspiring authors through a new writing process...
EngageNY
Launching the Performance Task: Prompt, Characters, Groups
Scholars unpack the word confession as they prepare to write confessionals based on characters from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Next, they read their narratives to a small group of peers as part of a final performance task.
EngageNY
Writing to Show, Not Tell: Dialogue, Sensory Words, and Strong Action Verbs
Consume, gobble, devour ... serving up strong verbs! Writers focus on using dialogue, strong action verbs, and sensory details in their writing. After analyzing a model narrative, they apply their learning to their own hero's journey...
Curated OER
Narrative Cartoons
Students create a narrative cartoon. In this narrative lesson plan, students use a Peace Corp website to collect information and photographs that they add captions to and use to create their own narrative cartoons.
Curated OER
Pinhole Photo Narratives
High schoolers create original pieces of poetry and use this as a basis for a photography series using "pin-hole camera" techniques. This high school instructional activity is cross-curricular in scope.
Curated OER
Fifteen Seconds of Fame
A reading of Panic in Paris launches a review of the elements of narrative writing. Class members work in groups to find narrative devices in the book and record their findings on a provided worksheet. Using the completed pages, emergent...
Curated OER
Constructing Narrative from the Migrant Experience in Literature
Excerpts from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and from John Fante's Ask the Dust, as well as a variety of primary source documents provide the background for an examination of the migrant experience from 1920-1945.
Curated OER
Advertising in the Contemporary World: An Introduction to Persuasive Texts
Beginning a persuasive writing unit with your middle schoolers? Approach it through something that persuades us all: advertising! Through studying video and print advertisement, your class will practice Common Core skills for reading...
Scholastic
Super Sentences & Perfect Paragraphs
An extensive collection of lessons and activities includes many writing, grammar, and proofreading exercises. With templates and worksheets that cover several steps in the writing process, from sentence to paragraph to essay, this...
Curated OER
Lesson: Impressions
Here, Autumn Poplars is the painting upper graders will analyze. They look at techniques, time period, and the use of impressionism to convey a natural theme. They go outside to make observations of nature and use what they see to write...
Curated OER
Lesson Plan 10: Writing Really Good Dialogue
Boring dialogue can run a great story into the ground; get your novelists using dialogue as a tool to move their story into deeper and more developed territory. As part of a larger writing series, this lesson has a worksheet that can...
Southern Nevada Regional Professional Development Program
“Tell Me a Story”: Moving from Reading to Writing
Narrative essay writing is the focus of a series of exercises that model for learners how to not only read a narrative, but how to also examine the techniques fiction writers use to create a setting, develop their characters, represent...
Shmoop
ELA.CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9-10.3
Teach your class the basics of narrative writing! The resource first describes the Common Core standard for narrative writing in-depth, and then moves into how to apply the standard. Show your class the example essay and quiz them...
Curated OER
Narrative Techniques: Plot Lines
Eighth graders develop plot lines as a part of narrative writing process. In this plot lines lesson, 8th graders work in learning groups to create a plot line for a piece of literature they've read. Students discuss the general plot and...
Curated OER
Writing to Persuade
Middle schoolers discover effective writing techniques to create persuasive essays. In this writing instructional activity, students investigate ways to express facts and points of view through persuasive essays. Finally, the middle...
Channel Islands Film
Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island: Lesson Plan 2
After watching West of the West's documentary The Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island, class members imagine how Juana Maria/Karana may have felt about living alone on the island for 18 years and craft a blackout poem or a narrative in her...
Massachusetts Department of Education
Nostalgia
To prepare for crafting their own memoir, class members examine poetry by Margaret Atwood, Billy Collins, Robert Hayden, and Claude McKay, stories by Richard Rodriquez and Willa Cather, and Barry Levinson's film Avalon. They examine how...
National Council for the Social Studies
Analyzing a Product or Political Advertisement
How do advertisements evoke specific thoughts and feelings? Class members find out through the exploration of the Internet, videos, television, magazines, radio, and posters. Learners investigate commercial advertisements, political...
Curated OER
Pudd'nhead Wilson: Writing Strategy
Assign this narrative essay after finishing Puddn'head Wilson. Learners write about their own experiences with overcoming obstacles. A five-step process is laid out on this assignment page.
Jackson School District
An Introduction to Satire
What is satire, and what are its characteristics? A handy handout provides young satirists with all the information they need to analyze a satire or to craft their own.
Indiana University
World Literature: "One Evening in the Rainy Season" Shi Zhecun
Did you know that modern Chinese literature “grew from the psychoanalytical theory of Sigmund Freud”? Designed for a world literature class, seniors are introduced to “One Evening in the Rainy Season,” Shi Zhecun’s stream of...
Norfork School District
Habits of Mind
Why do artists create? To solve a problem, of course. Young artists work individually and then in groups to create observational, imaginative, and narrative drawings in response to an assignment that requires them to employ all 16 Habits...
Curated OER
Adventures in Toyland
There are many ways to tell a story; Richard Patterson's three-dimensional painting If serves as the inspiration for some creative storytelling for elementary school writers. They watch a clip from Toy Story (you'll need to bring this),...
Curated OER
A Bug's Life
Look at life from a bug's perspective, and create a wonderful image based on what you think it sees. Learners use the crayon resist painting technique to draw and paint and picture of a bug's world from its point of view. Tip: This would...