A picture is worth a thousand words, but a comic strip combines both images and words for the ultimate narrative effect. After reading The Three Little Pigs and deciphering the plot elements, elementary readers work through four...

The March on Washington takes center stage in the discussion of chapter 15 of The Autobiography of Malcolm X; however, class members are presented with an entirely different view of the march from ones they have previously studied....

Memories of persons, places, and objects provide the seeds for the personal narratives kids craft during a 19-day, personal narrative writing unit. Beautifully crafted and carefully scaffolded so that all writers can be successful, the...

New ReviewPupils complete a My Children's Book Plan worksheet to carefully prepare for a narrative writing project. Scholars also continue working in their groups from lesson plan two, using their scavenger hunt worksheets to discuss what makes a...

New ReviewWorking in small groups, scholars look closely at a children's book to evaluate narrative techniques. Next, they complete a Children's Book Scavenger Hunt worksheet to analyze the literary elements of their selected stories. 

Personal narratives are powerful things. Whether told from the first-person or third-person point of view, whether in the form of an essay, a short story, novel, or video, whether fiction or fact, they capture readers and give them...

Jenna and Barbara Bush, daughters of former President George W. Bush, and author Armistead Maupin share with viewers their reasons for selecting John Knowles' A Separate Peace as one of their favorite books.

High schoolers read the final section of E. B. White’s Death of a Pig and take a close look at the impact of the words and tone he used. Learners discuss in pairs their homework from the previous night, answer questions about the text,...

Prior to the Mexican-American war, citizens had only heard updates about the battlefield from the United States government. But with the expansion of media publication in the nineteenth century, individual soldiers were able to reach out...

Working hard to please everyone often pleases no one, according Aesop's fable "The Man, the Boy, and the Donkey." After listening to an audio version of the story, individuals invent their own endings to the passage using a...

Writing is a process, and lesson planning is, too! A personal narrative unit stresses the writing process to pupils, who first examine various stories and poems as a model of autobiographical writing and then write their own stories....

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...

The Walden Woods Project encourages class members to identify and celebrate their own "Walden" that is need of protection. As part of the project, young environmentalists read passages that reveal Thoreau's literary naturalism and his...

An extensive list of narrative prompts is just what you need to inspire young writers to tell their stories. Arranged by topic, the questions are sure give them something to talk about.

Begin the writing process with a versatile graphic organizer. The instructional tool highlights a personal narrative's main event, setting, characters, beginning, details, and end. 

Before writing a personal narrative, get organized! Scholars complete a graphic organizer detailing one memory's events, including the feelings they felt and how their five senses were affected. 

"Family Time" is the theme of a unit equipped with a series of challenge activities. Concepts reinforced include possessive nouns, pronouns, text organization, adjectives, writing types, and patterns by way of creative and research...

Looking for stimulating writing prompts that won't make young writers cringe? A set of five personal narrative writing prompts engages pupils in analyzing, thinking, connecting, and writing about particular topics. Each prompt begins...

As an end-of-unit assessment, class members complete the final drafts of their Common Application narrative essay, and then meet in pairs to discuss the independent reading selection.

After a brief discussion of their independent reading texts, pairs exchange their college narratives, and using the provided peer review tool, give their partner suggestions on how the draft may be improved.

To underscore the importance of precise diction and sensory details in narratives, class members examine two statements to determine which is more effective and has a greater impact on the reader. Individuals then examine the word choice...