Borrowing Narrative Skills from Mr. Fletcher

It's the classic scene: Tom Sawyer is whitewashing a fence. Expose your learners to Mark Twain's humor while reinforcing reading comprehension. Eighth graders are encouraged to read and reread, achieving as much exposure to the text as...

Encourage narrative writing with a clever exercise. Class members watch episodes from movies and describe what happened to a character, including details about the setting, plot, and characters. Writers then craft a narrative about a...

To demonstrate their understanding of point of view, young readers identify the narrative perspective of excerpts from popular novels and then explain how they were able to identify the point of view of the passage.

"First Appearance," Mark Twain's tale about overcoming stage fright, serves as a model of a personal narrative and gets young writers thinking about milestones in their own lives. After examining student models and considering the...

To conclude their study of Out of the Dust, the 1998 Newbery Medal winning verse novel, individuals craft a narrative essay based on one of the themes in Karen Hesse's novel.

Comparing yourself to others is a sure way to make you feel worse about yourself. Kyle, a character in Escape From Mr. Lemoncello's Library, knows this well, as it is difficult for him to compete with his older brothers. Will he finally...

If you're looking to start a unit based around narrative writing, make sure to consider this resource while you're planning. This book covers five topics: writing personal narratives, writing narratives about others, writing narratives...

Help your class find their writing voices with this lesson which uses the work of Ralph Fletcher to guide a "Prompt in Reverse" activity. Using the chapter "First Pen" from Fletcher's Marshfield Dreams, learners decipher what they...

First things first. Before writing a personal narrative, young authors must plan out a sequence of events to include in the story. Learners accomplish this by imagining their topic as a movie playing in their mind's eye, moving...

Work on narrative skills by discovering how to be focused in writing. Upper graders will brainstorm the importance of focus in texts. They study transparencies of a narrative story from a 4th grade student. Then they study the focus of...