Our county requires we teach Narrative Writing first this year. This is sad news because we've always taught expository first and we both agree that our writing program "Write Reflections" has a MUCH better expository outline than narrative. In fact, we are
not fans of the Narrative writing template at all. The boxes are really small and we all know that first graders do not write all that small, especially in the first few months of the school year. Not to mention we love teaching writing techniques for story writing like similes, onomatopoeia's, vivid verbs, idioms, and show not tell. We have found that they aren't as capable this early in the year and we were able to get much better narrative stories second semester. We kinda just through up our hands and said, "Oh, well!" We don't have much of choice so we thought we should at least create a new B-M-E outline. We created the document below as a planning sheet/outline for students to brainstorm the beginning-middle-end of the their story before they write. It has helped tremendously! Now if we could just convince our county to give us a little more freedom when it comes to writing instruction!
We encourage students to try and create a problem and solution for their story in their outline. We explain not EVERY story has a problem and solution but most do! This is something we brainstorm as a class before each and every writing topic! Feel free to use!
