How to Plan Your Narrative Writing Unit

Your narrative writing unit is approaching. *gulp* You want students to walk away with a successful narrative essay in the end, but your last narrative writing unit left a lot to be desired. You had to hover over students to get them to write. And you were disappointed with the essays you received. Let’s talk about how you can teach narrative writing so the content sticks and the essays wow.

Why Narrative Writing is So Challenging

My first year of teaching, I thought narrative writing would be the “easy” unit. They are just writing stories, right? But it turned out that teaching narrative writing had a unique set of issues.

Unlike other genres, narrative writing doesn’t just ask students to be good writers, they also have to be good storytellers. They need to think creatively and put it to paper. That was hard for a lot of students.

Students’ struggles had a lot to do with the narrative writing elements. Students might be able to use dialogue, but is it dialogue that moves the story forward? Or is it random and pointless? They might be able to describe a character, but can they develop motives for them? And consciously understand why their character would behave a certain way? Oof. It’s hard work.

Planning Your Narrative Writing Unit

Inside my workshop, Navigating Narratives, I take you deep inside my narrative writing unit. I’m not just showing you how to set up your unit, but how to teach narrative elements in a way that students can successfully apply them. AKA how to get those stellar essays you’ve been hoping for.

I want to share some steps I took to create my narrative writing unit. Hopefully, it helps you develop your own writing unit (Or you can always grab mine! It comes free with the Navigating Narratives workshop. ?)

#1 Alternating Units

Before I give you the exact layout of my narrative writing unit, it’s important to mention that I plan with alternating units (and I recommend you do too). Alternating units means that I focus on one genre each month, and we are alternating between reading and writing within that genre.

For example, during your narrative writing unit, you may also teach a realistic fiction or historical fiction reading unit, as those would fall in the same genre. This is important because you’re not solely focused on writing during this month, and you might use some of the text your reading to support narrative writing.

#2 Pacing Guide

Next, it’s time to create a pacing guide. When teaching narrative writing, I’d plan to work through the unit in about 17 days (give or take). In the Navigating Narratives workshop, I provide you with a pacing guide, and I give you an in-depth overview of each day. Here is the gist, though.

You’ll see that the first two weeks focus heavily on narrative writing elements. You’ll teach a mini-lesson on each element, share an example (from a text), and have students work on their drafts. Then, we move into grammar and revising. Students will beef up their essays, and you’ll conference with them. By day 17, students have a final draft to turn in.

#3 Class Period Structure

Now you’ll want to decide how to break down your class period. This will depend on how much time you have students. Inside the Navigating Narratives workshop, I give you a breakdown of a 45 – 65 minute class and a 90 minute block schedule.

For the purpose of this blog, I’ll give you a quick overview of what you want to include in your narrative writing schedule. Start the class as usual, with a bellringer or mentor sentence. Then, transition to your writing mini-lesson. You’ll teach the skill, show examples, and have students jot notes in their notebooks. (PS. I include teaching slides for these lessons in Navigating Narratives.)

The bulk of the class period will be spent on the actual writing workshop. This is quiet time for students to apply the skill to their writing and work on their narrative essays. If you plan to do writing conferences, they would also be done at this time.

#4 Mentor Texts

I talked about this briefly, but mentor texts will be a big part of making sure your students nail their narrative essays. Because you’ll (hopefully) be using alternating units, you’ll also have a fiction unit going at the same time.

During your mini-lesson, use examples from this fiction text to demonstrate narrative writing elements in action! Students need to see writing in action in order to replicate it. You can show them examples of effective dialogue or establishing context.

In the Navigating Narratives workshop, I share how I use mentor texts to teach the narrative writing elements and support students writing.

#5 Writing Conferences

Lastly, you’ll want to plan for writing conferences during your narrative writing unit. Writing conferences scare a lot of teachers because you’ve only been taught one way to do it. I prefer a casual approach to conferences. That could mean pulling up a chair besides a students desk or calling them over for a quick chat.

Instead of drilling students and marking up their pages, just start reading the narrative essay out loud and share your thoughts. “I think you might be forgetting a word here.” or “Hm, I wonder why the character would do that?”

If you want to see how I used writing conferences in my narrative writing unit, you can get the details in the Navigating Narratives workshop.

Navigating Narratives Workshop

If you are stressed trying to plan your narrative writing unit (or upset that student essays never turn out like you hope), then Navigating Narratives is the place to be. This workshop will walk you through planning, grading, scaffolding, classroom management, and more. I cover all the narrative writing topics under the sun, so you feel confident teaching narrative writing to students.

Plus, you’ll also get resources that make it easy to apply in your classroom. You’ll get my Narrative Writing Unit, Narrative Elements Teaching Slides, Grading Workshop, and Narrative Dialogue Mini-Unit for free.

You can also get access to the workshop inside The Hungry Teacher’s Hub! This is a membership specifically for middle school ELA teachers. With your membership, you get access to classroom resources, complete units, and workshops like Navigating Narratives.