I’ve got upperclassmen enrolled in end-of-the-day ELA, and they are gone a LOT for activities. My class of 19 (already small) had 10 kids out due to activities last Friday, leaving me with nine kids. It was great because my co-teacher and I were really able to sit down with those kids and hammer out revisions on their summative personal narrative essays.
Pero…what about the other ten?
I could re-teach the entire lesson again during a seminar class, but that wouldn’t leave me any time for meeting with students who are struggling. I could meet with them 1:1 before or after school (not practical, and exhausting). OR…I could create a series of handy revision videos they could access to see what they had missed. Bonus: my kids with IEPs could watch the lesson all over again in Study Skills class as they revise. Yeah, I thought, let’s do that!
I wanted students to be able to see how a mediocre essay could evolve over time into a much stronger piece of writing. This four-part video series is FREE on myYouTube channel. I advise watching the videos sequentially to see the progression from the original “blah” essay to the pretty great one by the end of video #4. Videos only run 8-15 minutos, so they should be engaging enough for even distracted kids.
Topics covered are:
- “Adding Details”–Anticipating and Answering Readers’ Questions
- “Being More Descriptive”–Using Sensory Details and Figurative Language
- “Show, Don’t Tell”–Using Clues to Allow the Reader to Infer Meaning
- “Varying the Sentence Structure”–Using Dialogue to Break Up the Narrative
My own students said these were helpful, particularly because they show ONE STRATEGY at a time, using the same essay throughout. They said it made them feel like they actually knew what I wanted them to do when I told them to revise.
Check out the video series on YouTube. Like I said, it’s free…and it might improve your students’ narrative writing!
Palabras clave: narrativa personal, personal narrative essay, ELA secundaria, ingles de secundaria, essay revision, Alojamientos, video lessons, enraged2engaged, ELLA
