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Personal Narratives
Students complete writing lessons to help students select a writing topic, prepare a writing plan, and create an interesting beginning. In this personal narratives lesson, students complete intensive modeling activities to write their...
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The Personal Narrative - Part 3
Let's peer edit! Have your writers exchange their personal narratives with another learner! While peer editing, they will look for any missing information and identify strong details. They can practice literary analysis skills using a...
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Women Call Out: The Personal Narrative
After reading and discussing several personal narratives written by women in the 1920's, class members write a personal narrative of their own about a time in their lives they felt controlled. Sample narratives can be accessed through...
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Writing a Personal Narrative
Students learn characteristics of an effective personal narrative. In this personal narrative lesson, students discover ways to show rather than tell, adding richness and detail to their writing. Students evaluate a news article for...
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Lesson: The Gift of Giving
Giving gifts has been a part of the human experience since modern man walked the earth. Upper graders explore the culture of gift giving in Mayan times through an artistic analysis. They analyze gift giving and palace life as seen on an...
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Writing a Personal Narrative
High schoolers analyze a variety of rhetorical devices including metaphor, hyperbole, metonomy and imagery. They read samples of autobiographies, work in groups to complete writing skills activities and produce individual personal...
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Activity 3: Composing Personal Narratives
What was your most (exciting, maddening, nervous, thrilling, etc.) experience in school? A part of a unit on narrative writing, in this activity class members review the elements of the form and then choose an event when they learned a...
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A Personal Narrative on the Immigration Experience
The students create a personal narrative on their experiences with immigration. In this instructional activity, students are asked to read and understand examples of narrative writing as well as evaluate lyrics from Ben Folds Five to...
Complete College America
The Marshmallow Reading/Writing Project
Which option would most children choose: One marshmallow now, or two marshmallows in 10 minutes? Learners watch the social experiment on video and discuss their observations. They then read articles and work in small groups to analyze...
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Memoir
After reading and analyzing two narrative memoirs, middle schoolers engage in a variety of activities, including writing an essay, developing a story map, and creating character charts. They then compare and contrast story maps, and...
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Sense, Sensibility and Sentences: Examining and Writing Memorable Lines
Involve your readers in finding works of literary genius. Have each individual write down compelling sentences that they read or hear, whether in a newspaper, advertisement, book, movie, song, or any other place! Once each person has a...
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Writing a Character Sketch
Combining descriptive and expository writing skills, middle schoolers create a character sketch about someone they know well. They use a graphic organizer to help them discuss a model character sketch and organize/write one of their own....
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Reliving History through Slave Narratives
Helpful for an American literature or history unit, this lesson prompts middle schoolers to examine slavery in the United States. They read slave narratives that were part of the Federal Writers' Project and then conduct their own...
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The Stuff of Stories: Using Museums to Inspire Student Writing
Middle schoolers write descriptions, narratives, and dialogues based on objects of art and time periods in a museum. They base several writing assignments on art objects and paintings, including a literal description and an emotional...
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Lesson Plan: Humans and the Land
Art acts as inspiration for a conversation about human impact on the environment and creative writing. The class examines three pieces, looking for evidence of human impact on the landscape. They then write a first-person narrative, from...
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Narrative Nuts and Bolts
After viewing slides and reading about child labor, young authors compose an original narrative story. They practice note-taking skills and work to effectively engage a reader by incorporating plot, logical order, complex characters,...
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Correlative Conjunctions
Young scholars identify correlative conjunctions in sentences and then rewrite pairs of sentences as a single sentence with correlative conjunctions. They practice diagramming sentences of various sentence patterns and then write a...
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Summer Shorts
Want to use sequence maps in your narrative writing unit? Young writers work to create personal narratives about their summer vacation. They write a narrative of their vacation and create a display using summer clothing shapes made from...
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Lesson: Writings from a Room with No View
Learners examine art by considering how the subject matter and artists design choices affect the viewer's experience. They use the provided close-up images and notes to analyze the painting, Poppies. Afterward, they use the painting as a...
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Revising Pronouns and Antecedents
Students choose better pronouns to use in their writing. In this pronouns in writing lesson, students identify pronouns in their writing, then replace second person pronouns to improve their writing.
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Writing Fiction: Using Older Characters
Out with the old and in with the new? Not so in this lesson plan, which explores the idea of writing older characters in fiction. Students learn the value of varying their characters, exploring different perspectives, and avoiding...
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Creative Writing - Getting Ideas
Learners examine the procedures that writers utilize to obtain and develop ideas for writing. Journal writing is fostered as a primary step in the writing process. Learners are encouraged to pay careful attention to using complete...
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Write a Round-Robin Story
Students discover the elements of a story (introduction, plot, climax, resolution, denouement). In groups of five, one student writes an introduction and passes it to the next person, who writes the plot and passes it to the next person,...
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In Search Of Wisdom: An Interview With An Elder
The key to writing a good narrative is having good material to work with; and the key to getting good material is asking good questions. Working in groups, class members brainstorm questions that might result in the most interesting...