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Why a class specifically on narrative and memoir? In Nevada, our fifth graders take a writing examination, and their writing is assessed using four of the six writing traits: idea development, organization, voice, and conventions. The prompts given to the fifth graders are narrative in nature, and students are asked to reflect on experiences from their pasts. We believe that if all our Nevada teachers created mentor text-inspired narrative lessons and units, their students would automatically do better on both their tests and their future writing assignments. Our inservice course was designed to help K-12 teachers design powerful lessons on narrative and memoir. In our class, each teacher participant receives a complimentary copy of two Ralph Fletcher books: the instructional and student-friendly How to Write Your Life Story as well as Fletcher's own autobiography Marshfield Dreams: When I Was a Kid. These mentor texts are used to guide our teacher participants as they created their own short memoir to share with their students.
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In our NNWP workshops, our Northern Nevada participants receive a complimentary copy of the NNWP's print publication, The Going Deep with 6 Trait Language Guide. This 198-page resource is valued tool in Northern Nevada. Teachers not able to attend our workshops can purchase their own copy of this guide through the NNWP's website; all proceeds from the sale fund the WritingFix website.
Our genre-inspired teacher workshops include a discussion of all six writing traits, but with each class we try to focus in on one trait that will focus us in on very specific skills. With narrative and memoir writing, our natural focus becomes idea development. All students should be expected to gain skills associated with this trait as they learn about narrative and memoir writing. You can access WritingFix's Idea Development Homepage and learn about the specific skills that make up this large and important trait. We also believe in differentiated instruction at WritingFix. You will have many students who can only focus on one trait and its skill-sets during writing time; however, you will have just as many who can handle thinking about multiple traits as they write and revise. At WritingFix, we call these optional traits our support traits, and we encourage teachers to pre-determine them as they design their lessons. For narrative writing, our support trait suggestions are: voice, word choice, and sentence fluency. Each of these support traits also have their own homepages, which you can access by clicking on their names. Questions we discuss: Which idea development skills do you currently have sufficient resources and lessons for instructing all your students? Which idea development skills might you spend some time creating new resources and lessons for? How can you provide scaffolded help with idea development for you students who will need it? How can you provide enrichment for your students who are also working on support trait skills? |
Great "Skill Advice" directly from Ralph Fletcher: Inspired by How to Write Your Life Story |
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During our Narrative Workshops that are funded by grants or by schools, we're pleased to give our participants complimentary copies of two wonderful companion texts: Ralph Fletcher's How to Write Your Life Story as well as his memoir, Marshfield Dreams: When I Was a Kid. You can learn how our teachers are asked to discuss Marshfield Dreams with our "Teacher Book Club" materials/suggestions that are posted lower on this page of resources. The great thing about Fletcher's How to Write Your Life Story is that he shares his own techniques for writing his own memoir. The advice he offers is both easy to understand, and it comes with accompanying passages from Marshfield that directly showcase his own advice. Fletcher doesn't use the language of six traits when he discusses his own writing's strengths, but the skills he suggests to young writers working on narratives are clearly sub-skills of the six writing traits. As part of our workshop, we ask our participants to paraphrase some of Fletcher's best advice, to identify which trait(s) each piece of advice falls under, and to find unique quotes from the book that show off the advice. Below you can click on some of the posters created by past workshop participants and see them in larger form. We challenge our participants to adapt this activity to work with their own student writers, as these posters become great visual representations of the skills you want students to remember when writing narratives. |
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Great Fletcher Advice: "Write Small" trait link: idea development & word choice |
Great Fletcher Advice: "Create Your Characters" trait link: idea development & voice |
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Great Fletcher Advice: "Invigorate your Verbs" trait link: word choice & voice |
Great Fletcher Advice: "Wake Up Your Narrator" trait link: voice & idea development |
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In our Narrative Workshop, we compare the narrative genre to the expository genre. Why? In Nevada, both our fifth and eighth grade students used to be tested using narrative writing prompts, but after 2010 only fifth grade will continue with narrative; eighth grade is switching to an expository prompt. As we prepared to face this change, we discovered interesting similarities and differences between narrative writing and expository writing. We felt it very important to discuss those differences in both our Narrative Inservice and our Expository Inservice. By understanding where the two genres are the same, where they are different, and where there is a gray area, a teacher can serve as a much better guide in helping students make the same understanding. First, we ask our workshop participants to study Nevada's Language Arts standards for both expository (pages 49-50) and narrative (pages 51-52) writing. Next, we ask them to work with a small group to make a Venn diagram that explores the two genres. Finally, the small groups must each create a chart-sized non-linguistic representation (another Marzano technique!) of their Venn diagrams' biggest ideas. These charts decorate the training room and are referred to throughout the Narrative Writing Workshop. Below, find several samples of these non-linguistic representations from a recent Narrative Workshop. If you click on the images, you can see them in larger form. Questions we discuss: How must students be taught to think differently about the six writing traits when they are writing narrative and expository writing? Which trait must be thought about in the most different way? Which trait can be thought about in the most similar way for both genres? How do you address the traits that will need to be considered "gray areas" somewhere in between the two purposes of writing? |
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Most of our WritingFix professional development workshops challenge teachers to "make and take" a new lesson to bring back to their classrooms for trying out with their own students. True enough, WritingFix provides a plethora of quality lessons that are ready-to-use, and teachers sometimes don't see the point in making something new when so many resources already exist, but we really believe in the importance of every teacher still designing something for themselves. When you borrow a lesson from our website, you are applying someone else's ideas; when you create a lesson inspired by our website, however, then you are learning about topics at a much deeper level. To help our teacher participants design a differentiated writing lesson, Corbett Harrison, one of the presenters at our Narrative Writing Workshop, shares ideas from one of his favorite original trainings: The Seven Elements of a Differentiated Writing Lesson. He challenges the workshop's attendees to consciously design a lesson that--at the very least--makes use of five of the seven elements he discusses. To learn more about Corbett's trainings and workshops, you can visit his website. |
Designing a differentiated lesson? Consider these...  |
Focus Trait: Word Choice Lesson Author: Amy Hybarger, Northern Nevada middle school teacher, librarian, and NNWP Consultant |
Focus Trait: Idea Development Lesson Author: Kim Polson, Northern Nevada elementary teacher and NNWP Consultant |
Focus Trait: Idea Development Lesson Author: Karen McGee, Northern Nevada elementary teacher (retired) and NNWP Consultant |
Focus Trait: Idea Development Lesson Author: Karen McGee, Northern Nevada elementary teacher (retired) and NNWP Consultant |
Focus Trait: Idea Development Lesson Author: Corbett Harrison, Northern Nevada high school teacher and NNWP Consultant |
Focus Trait: Idea Development Lesson Author: Carol Gebhardt, Northern Nevada elementary teacher and NNWP Consultant |
Focus Trait: Idea Development Lesson Author: Dena Harrison, Northern Nevada middle school teacher and NNWP Consultant |
Focus Trait: Voice Lesson Author: Amy Richards, Northern Nevada elementary teacher and NNWP Consultant |
When our teachers propose a lesson during our narrative workshop, we ask them to plan for revision and to make absolute certain they find time to get to it when they teach. We also spend a great deal of time talking about how to teach revision through modeling and focusing on trait skills. The three lessons below are discussed in our narrative workshop because they inspire that type of writing through their prompts, and they go out of their way to teach revision. Questions we discuss: How do these three lessons teach revision by focusing in on a specific trait-inspired skill? How does the modeling aspect of each lesson increase the likelihood that students will authentically revise? How does the idea of introducing a mentor text after students have written a rough draft broaden your thinking about how you use mentor texts? What kind of mentor texts (currently on your classroom bookshelf) might inspire a revision lesson taught in this way? |
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Mentor Text: All the Places to Love by Patricia MacLachlan Focus Trait: Idea Development |
Mentor Text: The Leaving Morning by Angela Johnson Focus Trait: Idea Development |
Mentor Text: Owl Moon by Jane Yolen Focus Trait: Idea Development |
There are dozens of additional revision lessons and resources at WritingFix's Revision Homepage. |
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A few years back, when we first heard the term mentor text, we too asked, "What's a mentor text?" When we heard that it was a published piece of material that a teacher uses to guide and inspire student writing, we said, "Well, we've been using those for years in Nevada. It's nice to know the idea now has an official-sounding name!" Actually, the new name for this long-standing idea has inspired a lot of fresh and interesting research around the country. Here in Nevada, it prompted us to begin our own study on how our teachers use these types of text during writing instruction. We compared and then classified the types of mentor texts that our teachers were using, and we gained a deeper understanding of mentor texts. In our Northern Nevada teacher workshops now, we share the classification system below that we created, challenging teachers to make sure they understand the variety of ways that mentor texts can enhance writing instruction. To access the mentor text classification document we share in our lesson-building workshops, click here or on the document image at right. If sharing this document, which we encourage you to do, please keep its copyright citation intact. Mentor text questions we discuss: Do you currently have three strong examples of writing lessons that make use of the three types of mentor texts? Do you tend to use one type of mentor text over the others? Which type of differentiated learner benefits from using mentor texts during writing instruction? |
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Idea Mentor Texts These are books, poems, With narrative writing, often the idea is a topic; your class reads a memoir, for example, that recounts a unique experience the writer had over an amazing summer, so you prompt your students to write about an amazing summer experience they had. On this page, our Visiting Relatives lesson (inspired by two mentor texts, both featuring interesting stories about staying with family) is very much borrowing an idea to inspire your writers to tell their own stories. |
Structure Mentor Texts Some mentor texts provide an interesting structure to The structures you borrow can be obvious--like the passages in Margaret Wise Brown's The Important Book, but they can certainly be more subtle. Challenge yourself to begin looking unique structures that writers use to move from point A to point B when they write. On this page, our Frames for Narrative Warm-ups lesson clearly borrows from the structure from two books and presents a choice to students on which one they'll follow. |
Craft Mentor Texts The third type of mentor When you spot an author using a writing technique several times in the same piece of writing, it can be pointed out, discussed, and then students can be challenged to find places in their own rough drafts where the technique might improve their writing. On this page, the Introductory Phrases and Series of Three lesson is an excellent example of analyzing a real writer's techniques and challenging students to "try on" the style. |
articles, songs, etc., whose ideas spark an original idea from a writer. If you find yourself saying, "I really like the idea in this book, and I was thinking we might write something similar," then you are thinking about this type of mentor text.
analyze and then impersonate. Many of our students feel much more comfortable having a structure to hang their ideas on, and these mentor texts provide the safety of such a structure. 
text requires an analytical eye from both teachers and students. The best writers regularly use craft techniques in their published writing, and these techniques create an author's style and voice.
Each year at WritingFix, we select a Mentor Text of the Year. These texts are chosen based on two simple criteria: 1) they offer advice from real writers on how to write well and 2) they are worthy of being brought out multiple times during a school year, reminding students of their important messages. During the 2009-2010, we hosted a year-long project devoted to narrative writing. We chose Ralph Fletcher's Marshfield Dreams: When I Was a Kid as our Mentor Text of the Year because it met our two criteria and seemed to be an ideal mentor text for students preparing to write to narrative prompts on our state writing test. Ralph's memoir's chapters are short, manageable piece of texts that can read as part of the entire book, or as short stories that stand alone. He celebrates every day occurrences with strong writing, showing students that the people you know and the simple things that you do can make interesting pieces of writing. The memoir's content appeals to both boys and girls, and Ralph's companion book--How to Write Your Life Story--makes most of Ralph's writing process transparent. As part of our narrative workshop, participants discuss how the book can be used as both an idea and a craft mentor text. One of the participants' final project choices for the class is to design a lesson based on one of its chapters. Below are some of the lessons that have been inspired by this fantastic memoir to feature in your classroom.
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Some Mentor Text Reviews and Activity Suggestions from our Narrative Writing Class Members Mentor text questions we discuss: Choose four or five of the mentor text reviews below to analyze. After reading the teachers' suggested activities, ask yourself, "Is the mentor text being used as an idea, structure, or craft mentor text? Is the mentor text's use possibly achieving more than one of these three purposes?"
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Knots in My Yo-yo String by Jerry Spinelli  Activity Suggestion: Childhood Artifacts to Inspire Memoir |
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Would I Ever Lie to You? by Caralyn Buehner  Activity Suggestion: A Memoir Inspired by Three Truths and a Lie |
My Life in Dog Years by Gary Paulsen  Activity Suggestion: Memories from a Pet or Object's Point of View |
The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros  Activity Suggestion: Visualizing Memorable Details for a Memoir |
Cookies: Bite-Sized Life Lessons by Amy Krouse Rosenthal  Activity Suggestion: Learning Social Vocabulary while Launching a Memoir |
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexander  Activity Suggestion: Unofficial Rule Lists to Launch a Memoir |
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Our fifth grade test asks students to write a prompt that is narrative in nature. Students pre-write, draft, and revise this on-demand writing, which is then scored using four analytic trait rubrics. Specially trained Nevada teachers (on a Saturday) issue four scores to each fifth grader's writing sample: one score for idea development, one for organization, one for voice, and one for conventions. Students can earn up to five points per scored trait, which means a twenty is the highest score possible. In order to "pass" the test, students must earn a combined score of twelve points. The fifth grade test generally happens in late January or early February, and most Nevada fifth grade teachers spend their Fall helping their writers "bone up" on the trait and narrative skills needed to earn between a score of 12 and 20; we provide three excellent practice prompts and teaching resources specifically for fifth grade teachers here at WritingFix. Unfortunately, many fifth graders still don't earn the score of twelve after preparing all Fall. We have learned that beginning strategic preparation in fifth grade is just not enough time for too many of our writers. In 2010, we launched a new set of resources specifically for fourth grade teachers to begin using between March and May. These resources are designed to have students learn about traits and narrative writing while practicing for their fifth grade test three times. During our Narrative Workshop for teachers, we practice score some of the 4th and 5th grade samples posted at WritingFix, discussing the state's rubrics and ideas for teaching strategies for those students whose samples are clearly short of passing. Ultimately, we discover that many Nevada teachers don't realize what trait skills the state's narrative rubrics are specifically looking for, and this activity in our workshop helps spread the word on the importance of learning to use the state's traits rubrics. Below, find just a sampling of the narrative practice resources found on our Nevada Writing Test page here at WritingFix. |
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Prompt #1: Think of something you have done that brought you satisfaction, pleasure or a sense of accomplishment. Tell a story about this activity or event.
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Prompt #1: Think about a time when something special or unusual happened at school. It could be a time when something unexpected happened in your classroom. Or it could be any event at school that you remember well. Write about what happened and why it was special or unusual.
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Timeline Suggestion: After your eighth graders finish their expository writing tests in January or February, spend your spring reviewing narrative writing with them, assigning the following practice prompt. Prompt: Describe a favorite toy or object from your childhood. Try to remember its color, shape, texture, smell, and sound. How did it make you feel?
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Fourth grade narrative practice prompts
Fifth grade narrative practice prompts
Eighth grade narrative review promptThe difference between a non-Writing Project teacher and a Writing Project teacher is generally pretty simple. The first is a teacher who teaches writing, the latter is a writer who teaches writing. The National Writing Project has been challenging K-16 teachers to see themselves as writers for over three decades in this country. A teacher who writes alongside his/her students is a far better writing teacher because they can personalize the process.
Patricia Polacco's Thank You, Mr. Falker is a wonderful story that reflects on a teacher who made a difference in a child's life. As his part of our inservice class, Corbett has teachers brainstorm, then write short memoirs about teachers from their own pasts who made a tremendous impact on them as lifelong learners. By the final night of the inservice, participants have short memoirs that have gone through the entire writing process, and the purpose of these narratives is they can be shared with the writers' students. As a writer who teaches writing (as opposed to a teacher who teaches writing), Corbett shows an example of his own narrative about his favorite teacher: Mr. Borilla.
Here are some of the resources Corbett shares as he guides teachers in the inservice class through the process of writing these memoirs:
Questions we discuss: As a teacher, what is the most effective way to model your own writing in front of your students? How can you have them transfer their talk about your teacher model to their own writing when they meet in student groups? |
Example Narratives That Honor Teachers, written by our Workshop Participants |
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Jeesh, she was nuts! Western Traditions was my first class back into the swing of college and I got the nutty professor for a semester. Dr. Giddings hurled ideas at us, she weaved in and out of cramped college desks flapping her wings at the grand ideas of the universe, and she asked us, “Why?” for heaven’s sake. (Click here to read Temoca's entire narrative.) |
I was lucky. He wasn’t just my teacher, he was also my tennis coach, and in most respects, my mentor. Even today, I call him or email him with simple questions of good teaching, how to guide a wayward student back onto the path of academia, or how to deal with complexities of day-to-day life. And, he always does it with a story. One of my first memories of him was in a large college lecture hall. The room was large with stark white walls. I was sitting near the front with a clear view of the green chalkboard, with my legs swinging back and forth, because they didn’t touch the floor. The auditorium was filled with students listening to his booming voice tell the story of how the world stopped on November 22, 1963. He was professor of the year, and his class was full. Students were furiously taking notes, yet were not afraid to ask questions. Although I sat silently, I would look at my scribbles and know they were meaningless compared to his words. I think this was the moment I fell in love with stories. He made a very complicated, scary moment so clear through the simple act of telling a story. (Click here to read Jenny's entire narrative.) |
Mr. Stanley always played his guitar on Fridays after lunch. Always. Our fifth grade class would gather in a circle on the floor in front of him and he would strum his guitar and sing goofy songs about our lessons that week. He sang about the Dewey Decimal System and the solar system, fractions and freedom and reading and responsibility – it was the coolest thing that had ever happened to me at school! So the day that I came in from lunch and saw the guitar still in its case and Mr. Stanley perched behind his desk, I was livid. What had we done to deserve this? Who had misbehaved and gotten our music taken away? Who had disrespected Mr. Stanley and made him so mad that he wouldn’t sing for us today? I was going to kill that person. After everyone had trickled in from recess and came to the same realization that I had, we quickly sat in our desks, folded our hands in front of us and assumed innocent faces. There had to be some way to get the guitar and singing and fun back. (Click here to read Lisa's entire narrative.) |
He no longer wanders the dimly lit, crowded halls. He no longer warmly greets new students with that genuine, gleaming-white, toothy smile…welcoming the lost to “come on in.” That same bright smile appeared in his sparkling, jet-black eyes…seeming to open the doors to the cold, shadowy hall…making anyone feel safe, wanted, and truly cared for as they enter their new surroundings at Traner Middle School, I remember that terrified feeling as I peered out the steamed up windows of the overcrowded, yellow school bus. WE had all grown up together, attended the same school…even if we didn’t always have the same teachers. WE…the soon to be 6th graders from Sun Valley Elementary in the mid 70’s…all heard the gruesome stories about gang fights, drugs, having to “dress out” and shower for P. E. in front of others, and being assaulted in the hallway bathrooms without anyone knowing by “those black kids.“ WE were the “outsiders from Scum Valley” being bussed to the “Hood” where the “Crips” and the “Bloods” were prevalent. WE were the first group of 6th graders to venture into middle school…WE were the new kids on the block, taking that first timid step off of the noise-filled bus onto the silent and still black asphalt walkway that led up to those doors of doom. (Click here to read Kelly's entire narrative.) |
My Mentor 
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