Title – Learning to write Narratives (explaining yourself in stories)

By – Jamie Rhodes

Subject – Language Arts

Grade Level – 3-4

Help your students explain their ideas in a story. Use the lesson on explaining paragraphs first. (The lesson on paragraphs is on this site too.) Take one of their paragraphs and create it into a story, explaining that their paragraph is full of details about their topic sentence. Break down each individual paragraph or do one on the board or overhead to show students what they need to do. Here is our example: I had a bad day. (This was a topic sentence for the day before.) I got into trouble at school. I missed the bus. When I got home my brother told on me for not feeding the dog. I don’t want to repeat it. We took this paragraph and decided that it could be a story. We decided that the first sentence could be part of the beginning. Our first paragraph looked like this: While I was setting in my room after dinner, I remembered what a bad day I had. I got into trouble at school, I missed the bus, and my brother told on me for not feeding the dog. We then took the three reasons for getting into trouble and placed them into separate paragraphs using showing sentences to make our paragraphs more vivid details. Finally, we took the last sentence of the paragraph used earlier and turned it into a conclusion. As an assignment we turned our paragraphs into stories. We read them to the class and got input from each other.

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