Ideas to Teach Narrative Writing in Third Grade

Teach children the aspects of a narrative story.

Narrative writing is an important component to third-grade literacy lessons. Students in grade three have been exposed to a variety of texts and are familiar with sentence structure and punctuation. When teaching narrative writing to third graders, teachers need to provide children with a range of media, including story books, novels and comics. All of these types of media allow children to view the different forms of narrative writing.

Read, Read and More Reading!

Through different methods of reading, children begin to learn the structure and format of narrative stories. One way to encourage narrative comprehension is to do a rotational reading activity. A group of students can be doing independent narrative reading in a designated area of the classroom. Another group of students can be working with a teacher to do some guided reading. Guided reading requires the teacher to prompt and encourage predictions and reflections while reading as a group. The teacher can also read narrative stories to the entire class, posing questions about the text and punctuation. The teacher can introduce the parts of a narrative, including the orientation, complication and solution. Third-grade students are familiar with setting and characters; however, the teacher can further cement these concepts when discussing stories.

Finish The Story

Once students are comfortable with the narrative format and have been exposed to a variety of narrative stories, start writing an original story with the class. Provide the setting and characters to guide the students. Label the three parts of narrative writing on the board. The class can fill in the orientation and complication together by brainstorming the parts to a story. Include all student ideas or alter the ideas together as a class. Explains to the students that they have started a story, but it needs to be finished. Assigns students to write the solution component of the story independently in their writing books. Check to ensure that students understand that the solution needs to match the other parts of the story and needs to resolve the previous complication. Grade-three students are able to write independently and have been introduced to story writing in grade two, so they are comfortable with independent writing.

Write a Narrative

After having students finish a narrative, they are familiar with the elements needed to write a narrative story. So assign them the task of writing their own narrative story. First write the steps to creating a narrative story on the board, including characters and setting. Read a short, narrative story to the class to refresh the parts of narrative writing. Question the students about the story, observing their comprehension as they answer. Give the students a limit of four to five pages for their story, encouraging the students to be creative. Your expectations should be for students to display proper punctuation, story coherence and appropriate language for a third-grade class.

References

• Cyberschool: Narrative Writing
• Teacher 2 B: Writing a Short Story

Resources

• Nada Salem Abisamra: Teaching Writing