Genre Study
4th Grade Personal Narrative (Memoir)
Personal Narrative (Memoir): Writing about a small moment in your life. “Unlike biographies, memoirs
allow us to get inside the heads of other people, to experience a moment in their lives from their
perspective.”1
Immersion Phase
During the immersion phase, we will read one or more texts of the genre to students in order to
familiarize them with the genre.
Pass out copies of Learning About Baseball. We will present this as a shared reading. The teacher reads
Learning About Baseball aloud to the class as they follow along in a shared reading. Guide students to
notice the following attributes of the writing:

There is an introduction or lead, which describes a problem and “establishes tension” for the
reader.

The writing tells the story and also tells the author’s feelings about the story. (In other words,
“show, don’t just tell about the story.)

The story is based on a true event that happened to the writer.

The story is told from the reader’s point of view. In other words, the writer is telling what
happened to them.
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The story can be broken into several scenes, usually 3 or 4.

There are details about the character and about the setting.

There is an ending, which tells how the problem is solved.

There is some dialogue (characters talking) and also a description of things the author is thinking
(inner dialogue).
As you guide students to notice these parts of the personal narrative, generate a list of them on chart
paper.
1
Lattimer, Heather. (2003). Thinking Through Genre: Units of Study in Reading and Writing Workshops 4-12 (p.
24). Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.
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Genre Study – Grade 3, Personal Narratives (C Dworkin)
Prewriting Phase
Students should identify some interesting personal stories. The teacher begins by telling the students an
event or anecdote from his or her own personal experience. This could be an interesting family story or a
remembrance of a teacher from his or her own childhood. Students should then work in small groups and,
for a day or two, tell their own personal stories. The teacher may also wish to provide prompts, such as
“A Time When You Were Frightened,” “A Time When You Were Happy,” or “A Trip To the Emergency
Room.” In addition, creating a web of a larger life event to find the smaller, significant events within that
life event may be helpful.
For sharing, the teacher may wish to invite one or several students to tell their stories to the whole class.
After students have identified and orally told several stories, have them do three-minute quick writes of at
least three of their stories in their writer’s notebooks.
Next, students should rank their quick write stories in order of best to least liked and select a story for
drafting.
At the end of this process, students should have quick writes of 2 or 3 stories from which to build their
personal narratives collected in their writer’s notebooks.
Mini-lessons:

Finding a brief event in time. Teacher and student share of personal stories. Webbing important life
events. (Maybe in Prewriting Phase)
Drafting Phase
Students will choose on of their quick-writes from the writer’s notebook that they will then take to draft
form. You may wish to hand out draft paper for students that they have become used to using which has a
dot on every other line so that they can skip lines as they write and have room for revision. It may be
helpful for students to have draft paper that is marked scene 1, scene 2, and so forth so that they can work
on each part of the personal narrative on separate sheets of drafting paper.
As students continue the drafting process, begin each day’s writing workshop with an appropriate minilesson. Relevant mini-lessons are listed below and there are PowerPoint lessons to use for each of these
topics.
Mini-lessons:

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Showing, not telling, the author’s experience of event.
Begin the story by describing a problem or “establishing tension”.
End the story with a resolution to the problem or “resolving tension”.
Writing in the first person.
Creating strong descriptions of characters and setting to add voice and realism to story. (Word Study
Connection
Finding specific language to describe author’s feelings. (Word Study Connection)
Using dialogue
Sharing inner-thinking of character(s)
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Genre Study – Grade 3, Personal Narratives (C Dworkin)
Students will need 1 to 2 weeks to continue their drafting process. When students feel that they are
finished you should confer with them using the student rubric for personal narrative.
As students finish before other members of the class they can work in their writer’s notebooks. You may
also wish to have them begin a second personal narrative. You may wish to provide a list of prompts for
them to begin working in the writer’s notebooks. These can include those that are listed in Guiding
Readers and Writers, Grades 3-6 or from the chapter on writer’s notebooks in The No Nonsense Guide to
Teaching Writing.
Publication Phase
As students finish their projects, find ways to publish them. They can be posted on a bulletin board or, if
typed on the computer, printed or posted on classroom websites. If the work is going smoothly, and you
find you have time, you may wish to teach students the process of the final draft conference.
Word Study Connections
Word Study mini-lessons to accompany this unit include:

Creating word webs to find specific language to describe characters, settings and feelings.
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Genre Study – Grade 3, Personal Narratives (C Dworkin)