Week 4: How to move students forward with writing topics that tell their own stories…

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
Joan Didion, The White Album

What is narrative writing? Many of us may have a hard time explaining this concept to our students- especially those in the younger grades. What does narrative writing look like in the younger grades classrooms? Well, in order to teach students how to write their own personal narratives, we have to share examples of narrative writing with them as mentor texts. A great example of a mentor text that can be used with elementary aged students would be Happy Like Soccer or Ask Me. While using these as mentor texts, we can show students the importance of sharing their own stories- stories about their lives. That is all narrative writing is- a personal story! Narrative writing is very important to students because it allows them to know that their writing has a purpose- a purpose to share themselves with others. This gives them a sense of agency within their own writing. Allowing students to have time to write personal narratives is worth while because they can take ownership over their writing and this will give them motivation to write.

How can we help students with finding writing topics?

As a beginning teacher, I have really struggled in my role this year as a reading interventions specialist when it comes to getting my students excited about writing. Writing is something that many students feel as though they are not good at- hence why they always say that they “don’t know what to write about.” Something that I have really come to love is the idea of creating heart maps to help students gain ideas of things they can write about. When you have students creating heart maps or hand maps, they are creating writing topics without even knowing that is what they are doing. Once they have created their heart map, they have a list of writing topics on hand whenever they need! Students should be writing about things that are accessible to them- things that they know about. When students are writing about things that are important to them, they will feel more motivated to write and feel agency for what they are producing.

One example for how to help students find writing topics can be sharing mentor texts with them that include another persons personal stories. One mentor text that I find particularly helpful is Happy Like Soccer by Maribeth Boeltz. This book is a personal narrative about one child’s experience with soccer and the story she tells about her life through soccer. She compares things in her life to the feelings that soccer give her. This is one idea that we can stress to our students is that writing is created through feelings. Writing is associated with feelings. Having students create heart maps can help them brainstorm ideas of things that they like- then they can write about those topics or how those topics make them feel. Have students brainstorm things or people that they love. Then, demonstrate to them, using your own heart map, how to pick ONE thing and then expand upon that ONE thing by telling a personal story about that ONE thing.

Finding a Writing Territory

What is a writing territory? A writing territory an area of writing where an author/ writer may specify in writing. Our job as teachers is to help students find their own writing territory. But how can we assist students in finding their own writing territories? Giving students opportunities to write often will allow them to feel more comfortable with writing and help them discover their own territories.