Our Foray Into The Personal Narrative

I actually began this post about 3 weeks ago, but just didn't publish it until now.

Yesterday's reading was Vera Williams' A Chair For My Mother. We used this book to further our example of a personal narrative for our writing unit. Williams does a really great job at stretching the story.

Today, just before writing our own personal narrative, we reread the excerpt where the narrator tells of the loss of her home due to a fire. We take notice of all the detail- great examples of stretching. While the point is to tell about the loss of her home, the narrator takes us through the events that lead up to her discovering the fire (the shopping, bus ride, tulips, etc.)

Personal narratives are somewhat daunting for Lyla. She feels that everything has to be a made-up story. She's extremely creative, so it was a little hard to get her just to think about what actually happened. Also she takes so long to draw. I am definitely going to require that drawing comes later from here on out.

Our preplanning really starts with the pictures. I make little booklets for her. This really helps the writing to be longer. This probably should have even more pages, but we could always add pages later. Here are the results.

		CLICK TO ENLARGE AND REDUCE!!!

On the first page, her illustration is of me walking her to the school bus. My DD thought it quite amusing to leave me headless. More importantly, she could have gone into detail about the walk down the driveway. Is it dark? Is it scary? What does it sound like? I wanted to add that, but this whole process was a little labored so we didn't. I may make it another assignment, although from what I've read, at this stage in the game I shouldn't give her topics. I may just do it anyway.