Create Lesson Plans Based on Movies and Film

Teaching Students to Write a Narrative

This is a complete lesson plan suitable for any secondary level class. Here are a few excerpts from the introduction:
A narration lets us know something. It tells us what happened. It tells us a story.

Our students love to hear narrations. They strain to hear the latest news among their friends about what happened over the weekend and they rush to see the latest films that promise a good story. . . . They are held by a good narrative in the same way that our ancestors, hundreds of years ago, gathered around a fire and listened to a tale woven from words.

As teachers, we can use this interest to help students learn to write and, at the same time, meet most of the curriculum standards associated with writing skills. The key is student interest. When their heads are into it, young people can write far better than when they are simply doing an assignment. Narratives, perforce, put their heads into the task.

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Teaching Students to Write a Personal Narrative is an excellent way to satisfy curriculum standards in writing.

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AN EXCERPT FROM THE LESSON PLAN

To give you a sense of how our Learning Guides can be used by teachers to develop lesson plans, we have set out below one exercise from Teaching Students to Write a Narrative. This is the second excercise in the lesson plan. At this point in the lesson, students will have had a short direct instruction on the three rules of narrative writing and will have rewritten a poorly drafted narrative to show rather than tell what happened. They will also have listened as a poorly written and then a well written narrative were read in class. All of these are provided in the lesson plan. The lesson plan then suggests that the teacher
. . . instruct students to think about a personal experience of their own that matters to them. It doesn't need to be especially dramatic or important; it simply needs to be significant. The readers will want to get something for themselves from the writing and for this reason students should think about a story that will be valuable to readers. Length is not an issue. Students should just write. This assignment should be checked to ensure that the language shows rather than tells. It should be returned to the student for rewriting if necessary.
After this exercise, the students will be given an "Anecdotal Biography" assignment to write narratives of ten significant events in their lives.



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