First Steps Writing (Narrative Writing)

Last year, our school undertook English Writing as an area of SSE (School Self Evaluation). We decided to take on the First Steps Approach to Writing. It breaks each genre down into a seven step approach which you build upon over seven-eight weeks. I felt that I really improved my teaching of English Writing as it was a more structured approach that allowed the children to progress steadily over the term. The difference in their initial draft and their final sample at the end of the 7-8 weeks was remarkable!

Available here

The writing genre book is available from PDST here and it incorporates the ideas of First Steps Writing.

This term, my class is focusing on Narrative Writing. And we are going right back to basics! We started looking at characters in our weekly story and discussing their traits. In particular, we have worked a lot on showing character traits throughout our writing rather than just stating them.

Next we began to work more on settings and how important it is to set a clear picture in the mind of the reader.
Both character and setting worksheets are available here.

Only then did we move on to planning the 'skeleton' of a story using story planners.

Story planner available here

At the end of the Narrative Writing genre, each child will have a few samples of their own narrative writing. they will select the piece their are particularly proud of and I will bind them all together as a booklet to add to our class library.

Assessment

Each child self assesses their work to identify areas they did well and aspects they could work on next time.  Free checklists are available here.