You can't tell it all!: Narrowing the focus of personal narratives

Students will learn to focus their personal narratives on just one main event by listing events on a topic and identifying one main event to write about. Focusing their personal narratives on one main event helps students to write about only the important things and leave out events and details that are not related to the main event.

A lesson plan for grades 3–5 English Language Arts

By DPI Writing Strategies

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Related pages

• "So what?" details: Students will learn that adding details to a piece of writing doesn't make it better if the details are "So What?" details. Details and elaboration should be related to the main idea and should move the story along in an interesting manner.
• Stretch it out: Good writers stretch out the important scenes in a story to make them more interesting to their readers. In this lesson, students will learn to stretch out a scene by adding things that they see, hear, think, and say to others.
• Action chains: Students learn to elaborate on an event in a narrative by expanding their sentences into action chains. Expanding single actions into an action chain provides the reader with a more detailed picture of an event in a narrative.

Related topics

• Learn more about details, focus, language arts, main idea, modeling, and writing.

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Learning outcomes

• Students (as a class) will be able to list events about one topic and then select one main event from the class list to write about.
• Students (individually) will produce paragraphs focused on one main event.

Teacher planning

Time required for lesson

1 hour

Materials/resources

• Transparency of Mall of America prompt: pdf rtf
• Transparency of Mall of America story: pdf | Click here
• Highlighters or Vis-a-Vis markers (multiple colors)

Technology resources

Overhead Projector

Activities

Modeling/Mini-lesson

(20 minutes)

1. Begin by brainstorming with students the importance of having a focus that is clear to a reader. Point out that with on-demand writing prompts, it is extremely important to narrow the topic or focus to a major action with related elaboration that develops the story.
2. Ask students why focusing on a topic or main event is so difficult. How can someone narrow down a focus from a field trip or a vacation? After all there are so many things that someone could tell about. On a narrative writing test, writers cannot write entire chapters. They must tell one story about one main event.
3. Say, “In this next activity, we will be looking at a 4th grade girl’s paper from the North Carolina Writing Test. When she opened received the prompt, she saw that it was about a fun time with a friend. After thinking about this prompt, she knew that she was going to write about her trip to the gigantic Mall of America in Minnesota with her friend Lauren. After all, it was the coolest place that she had ever visited. She saw one of the largest malls in the world with so much to do there! There was even a huge amusement park inside the mall. There was so much to tell that she couldn’t tell it all. Let’s see how she handled this problem.
4. “How did the girl manage to narrow her focus? One way to narrow the focus of your story is to list the different events that happened and then pick one event on which to focus.” Show the transparencies and read the scenario with the students. List the events that the girl could write about in the mall. Lead students to discuss how they can pick out a single moment and make it the focus of the story.
5. Next, show the transparency of the story that the girl wrote. Have students follow along as someone reads the story. At the end, ask students “What was the focus?” (Highlight the focus or point of the story: Roller Coaster Ride).
6. Use another color pen to highlight the details and elaboration. Note the details that make the Roller Coaster Ride the main focus. Point out to students that all the details of the story are about the roller coaster ride, which makes it a stronger narrative.

Guided Practice

(40 minutes)

7. Select an event to write about that all the students in the class participated in ? for example, a field trip, a fire drill, a school assembly, a hurricane/tornado/snowstorm/icestorm. As a class, brainstorm a list of events that occurred during this shared event. On the overhead, model writing a detailed paragraph on just one main event.
8. Then assign groups of students to write a detailed paragraph about each event (or have students select one main event of their choice to focus on). Have students share their paragraphs with a partner or in a small group.
9. Compile student paragraphs into a class book about the event (adding an introduction and conclusion written by the class).

Independent Practice

10. Follow up lessons may include analyzing other stories that illustrate students who were both successful at selecting a single main event or focus and those students who had great ideas but lacked focus. Some students told about so many things that their writing turned into a list and not a story!

Assessment

• Can students (as a class) list events about one topic and then select one main event from the class list to write about?
• Can Students (individually) produce paragraphs focused on one main event?

Supplemental information

• Writing Feature: Focus
• Writing Process Stage: Planning
• Writing Environment: Expressive
• Writing Genre: Personal Narrative