Chapter 9: Narrative Writing

"Children's understanding of story structure and conventions plays an important role in their ability to write as well as comprehend the stories they read" (p. 200). They can create stories with the help of minilessons, guided practices and independent writing. To assess the stories that children write, three components should be considered: children's knowledge about and application of the element in writing; children's use of the writing process; the quality of the story. Tompkins suggested three steps teachers follow to help a child who can't write a story: check his/her understanding of the elements of story structure, check his/her ablity to retell a story, and check to see if he has an idea for his story. A case study showed an inspiring result that when teachers helped students build "self-regulated strategy" with "verbalizing and visualising", students with writing difficulties used more words and images in their writing (Patel & Laud, 2009).

As Jaeun mentioned, children used to listen to a story and retll the story to somebody else and learned naturally about how the story is organized and what elements the story has. Especially narrative writing is related to children's story book reading. As Tompkins stated that checking children's ability to retell a story can be a yardstick to decide how well children understand the elements of the story and how good at producing in narrative writing they will be. In that sense, reading books to children and talking about the books they read from their early age is very crucial to develop their natural capability to write good quality narrative writing.

Reference
Patel, P. & Laud, L. (2009). Helping students to add detail and flair to their stories. Preventing School Failure, 54(1). 2-10. Retrieved from http://web.ebscohost.com.libproxy.lib.csusb.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=15&hid=12&sid=051bb061-8fe6-46d0-ae1d-b9d685c7b462%40sessionmgr11