Next Steps Narrative Writing Unit for Beginning Writers

Next Steps Narrative Writing Unit for Beginning Writers

Hey, y'all! We're well into the school year now, and our beginning writers are starting to master some concepts like complete sentences and writing stories in order thanks to our first narrative writing unit. But now it's time to move on to the next set of skills, like capitalization rules and ending punctuation. Our second narrative writing unit covers just that. 

We've worked on narrative stories for a few weeks, and their stories are coming along. But they're doing that thing where they just put a period at the end of every sentence instead of using a question mark or exclamation mark. They're also only capitalizing the beginning of the sentence because they don't know the other rules. It's time to change that. 

The first thing we work on is capitalization rules. We make use the slides as a guide, but make an anchor chart we can keep up all the time so that we remember the rules. We practice together with the slides, then with a partner, and then on our own. It's a quick and easy way to see who gets it and who needs more practice. 

Once, we've got that established, we start talking about ending punctuation and how to jazz up our writing a bit. Every sentence needs ending punctuation, but not every sentence needs to end with a period. We vary our sentences to make them more interesting! (See what I did there?)

We can also use adjectives to make our sentences more descriptive and interesting to our readers. The kids love to add adjectives to their writing. In our class, we call them "spicy" words. Again, we do an I do/we do/you do type lesson for punctuation and adjectives before heading into our brainstorming session. 

Before we start writing our own stories, we start identifying seed ideas. What I mean by that is, we don't write a short story and tell about every part of the whole day. We start with a small part, or the seed, and grow our story from there. With this in mind, we fill out our seed ideas page to start getting ideas. 

Our "forest" might be "family," and our seed ideas might be one time at dinner, when we went to the pumpkin patch or tree lighting, when a younger sibling was born, etc. We start with small moments and grow them into more quality stories than listing everything that happened on a given day. 

Once we have our seed ideas, we can choose which one to write about, put it in order for our rough draft, then write our final copies. It's all very simple for young learners and designed with efficiency in mind. 

You can check out the full unit in my TPT store here. It's designed for 3 weeks of lessons, but you can edit and adjust based on your students' needs and time requirements. While you're there checking it out, be sure to follow me on TPT so you don't miss anything new. And you might want to check out narrative unit one if your students are still working on forming complete sentences. 

I hope this was helpful to you and your classroom this year. Thanks for stopping by and have a wonderful week. I'll talk to you soon. 

Stay cozy,