Narrative Writing

This quarter in writing, our school focus is Narratives. The purpose of a narrative it to entertain, stimulate, motivate, guide, or teach. In all of our writing pieces, we always start with a hook. The hook is what get the readers attention. A narrative consists of a beginning, middle, and end. In the beginning, we need to grad the readers attention with interesting characters that have a situation or problem that needs to be solved. In the middle, we add additional complications to the plot. The end needs to wrap up the story and it sometimes makes a general statement about the human condition or it offers a moral.

Before we start our first narrative piece of writing, we have been working on mini lessons to perfect our craft. This past weeks focus was on using dialogue in our narratives. We use dialogue in our writing to add detail, re-live a scene that plays out, and to show our characters through interactions and more!

To begin, students were given students were assigned characters. Some examples are movie star/fan, officer/speeder, waiter/diner, principal/student, hairdresser/client, teacher/parent, twins, driving instructor/student driver, player/coach, flight attendant/passenger. Together they created a character cluster for each character to describe the character's appearance, personality traits, and mannerisms. They then had to brainstorm at least 3 possible conflicts, and then pick one to use. 

Students were then given either 5 red strips or 5 blue strips. With their partner they need to work on writing dialogue between their characters. They were in one setting with no time lapses. Once their dialogue was written, they looked at their character clusters.

 Each partner was given 3 more strips of paper (green or pink). On these they needed to come up with ways of adding characterization. On the first strip they described the characters appearance (trying not to use actual adjectives). On the second strip they needed to describe their personality (instead of saying "he was shy." - Chris looked at his shoes and continued his story, only allowing his eyes to peek at the audience). On the third strip, they had to write one sentence showing the character in action by using one of their mannerisms (Chris' bubblegum cracked in his mouth like…). One they were done, they needed to decide where to put these strips and place them into the dialogue (red/blue strips). 

Last, they used another color strip (purple) to add sentences describing other action details to reveal more about the characters and to flesh out their skit into a short story. They needed to agree where these strips would go. Once they were done, we taped their short story together. 

Below are pictures of the class working on writing dialogue cooperatively!