1. Launching Narrative Writing unit: Grade 7
Common Core

2. Building Our Community
What is your role in education?
What is your passion?
What is something few people know about you?

3. Framing Activity

4. Writer’s Notebooks
Getting a Community Started (Donald Graves) A Peek Inside My Notebook:

5. Concept Framing
The launching unit is all about community! For our purposes today however, you will need to wear many hats - think like a student, a teacher and possibly even a facilitator if you are charged with taking this work back to your school or district.

6. Launching Writing Learning Progression

7. Unit Purpose PRODUCT PROCESS
This unit, like the workshop in general, is predicated on the idea that writers and readers learn a great deal about their skills and their thinking along the way. The end of unit project is only one of these steps and shouldn’t be the only thing carrying weight in the minds of students and teachers. More conversation at end of unit with formative and summative assessments.
PROCESS

8. Principles for Success
Writing Models for Students
Getting a Community Started – Graves
A Peek Inside My Writer's Notebook - Ayres
Reading and Writing
Community
Expectation that lay foundation for all units
Here are some practical things to get us started. Some non-negotiables of successful workshop classrooms.

9. Notebook Development

10. Yes, WE must also write!
In order to teach these units well to our students, we must be writers ourselves!
Write as yourself, but push yourself to utilize the strategies and tools of each session.

11. Concept #1
Generating ideas while becoming a community and establishing workshop routines

12. Writers learn how to generate ideas for Narratives (Memoir) by first thinking of places that matter to them.

13. My Map Book

14. Writer’s generate to create and play with ideas
Generate a map(s) of your own.
Look for significant places (memories) in your mind to represent visually.
Label your image with the important memories and details.
What “big ideas” does the story seem to be about?

15. Generating – Quick Write
Using an inspiration from your map, jot down the story in your notebook.

16. Writer’s generate to create and play with ideas
Practice the genre of your grade level
6th – personal narrative with an emphasis on building skills to engage the reader by sharing both the writer’s perspective and experience in meaningful ways.
7th – memoir with an emphasis on an event that had a profound impact on your life and who you are because of this event.
8th – narrative poem with an emphasis on personal expression and sharing an ideas that matters.

17. Creating a Memoir What is a memoir?
How is it different than a personal narrative?
Other ways to generate personal stories that could get to memoir writing?
Session 2 Memoir Topics

18. Writer’s work in partnership
Creating a comfort level with partnerships is essential to this unit and those ahead. Take the time to build this community.
Turn to your shoulder partner and share a bit of what you are doing with them. You may consider sharing one of the following:
A place on your map
Why you chose to expand your thinking in this particular area
What you are trying to do as a writer.
Partners give one piece of specific, supportive feedback to each other. Where might they stretch out their piece?

19. Debrief
How do writers use their notebooks to generate, gather and record ideas for writing?
What strategies do writers use to figure out how to express their stories that matter?

20. Writing Immersion and Drafting
Concept #2
Writing Immersion and Drafting

21. The Bigger The Moment, The Smaller You Write (Ralph Fletcher)
Session 3
Memoir writers explore events or series of related events that remain lodged in memory and reconstruct those events to reflect personal significance.
The Bigger The Moment, The Smaller You Write (Ralph Fletcher)

22. What am I going to Write about?
Practice using these tools to organize thoughts into possible seed ideas

23. Teachers confer to know, understand and assess their students.
Questions to allow you to “Research, Decide, Teach”
What are you working on today as a writer?
Can you show me that part?
“Today I’m going to teach you” (1 thing!)
What are you planning to do next in your writing?

24. Debrief
What will be difficult for students when determining a memoir topic?
What strategies do we use to transform our writing and focus on the significance in our small moments in order to draw a reader’s attention?

25. Memoir Structure Chart Session 6
Consider this strategy for growing more writing out of students

26. Drafting
Choosing a strategy discussed, draft a memoir of an important place to you based on your map (and for later use in your classroom).

27. Debrief How might the strategy you tried work for students?
What difficulties do you anticipate?

28. Concept #3
Writers revise and edit and with the understanding that revision is about finding and developing potentially great writing, sometimes by adding more to the heart of the piece, rather than ‘fixing errors’.

29. Mark 2 places where you would like to think more.
Session 9: Revision
Mark 2 places where you would like to think more.
Possible strategies:
Stretch/Squeeze strategy
Memoir writers make use of description that creates vivid pictures in the minds of the reader. The most common types of figurative language are similes, metaphors, and personification.
What revision strategies would you encourage students to play with?

30. Debrief How might revision work look different now than in the past?
What might be challenges students and teachers will face with revision work?

31. Conferring What are you working on as a writer?
What are you trying to do as a writer?
What will you do today in your writing?

32. Teacher Role TCRWP Conferring Video Clips:
Writing in the Moment Conference
Providing Critical Feedback
Two different approaches to teaching similar skills within writing conference.

33. Debrief
How can conferring with others affect the outcome of our stories?
How do writers improve writing skills by studying and conferring about work from other authors?

34. Assessment

35. Formative Assessments
Study samples of student drafts or writers notebooks
Examine conferring checklists and revision/editing checklists
Questions to consider:
How do we use these tolls to guide instruction (plan future mini-lessons, form strategy groups, glean conferring teaching points, etc.)?
What other tools do we find helpful as formative assessments?

36. Summative Assessments
Examine assessment rubric and student samples of final drafts
Questions to consider:
How do we assess growth?
How might you translate both the process and product into grades?