Writing Like Patricia Polacco

The students have been studying the genre, narrative text.  The basic purpose of narrative text is to entertain, to gain and hold the reader's interest. It is based on  clearly developed charaters that have a problem or a goal to achieve.

The students listened to and read many books by Patricia Polacco who is an expert at writing narrative text.  The students completed a graphic organizer for the book, Thank You, Mr. Falker.  The students noticed narrative text has a beginning, middle and end.  It has characters, setting, goals to achieve and often a theme. The students also studied the vivid descriptive vocabulary the author used to create images for the reader.  The students also studied the various introduction sentences in her many books.

Using Patricia Polacco's books as the model, students wrote their own narrative texts.  The writing process was used. First, the students identified a topic to write about. Secondly, they discussed the story with a partner. Then they completed a graphic oganizer to help organize their sequence of events for the story. The students then wrote their stories. The next step was to revise and edit their stories with a partner and to conference with the teacher.  The final step was to write the final draft.

The writing process took about a week to complete the final text.  Last Wednesday, the students had an author's celebration to celebrate their extra effort in writing a narrative text. The students had refreshments while they read each other stories. Each student also read aloud his/her story to the class. The students reached the goals of writing an interesting introduction sentence and using descriptive vocabulary to create images for the reader! They are on their way to becoming phenomenal writers.