A breakdown for teachers who teach W.3 in middle school ELA. In this post, we’ve included learning targets, concept breakdowns, resource suggestions, and activity and assessment ideas!
No matter how the world changes, narrative writing never goes out of style.
There is just something about writing to entertain that really makes me excited, and I truly love teaching students about narrative writing and then reading their work.
It never fails that at least once a semester, I am truly blown away by at least one student’s incredibly creative writing.
As we dig into the W.3 standard, we will focus on helping students get more details into their writing by fully fleshing out their ideas, brainstorming, and getting feedback from others to improve their work.
As we start talking about how to teach W.3 in middle school, let’s start with the learning targets!
Learning Targets
By focusing on learning targets, we can model our lessons to hit on very specific goals and skills. In this post, we talk about how we break down each standard and make a plan for learning, practicing, and reviewing the standards throughout the year using the checklists below.
Using checklists like these, I’m able to fully explore the nuances between the grade levels, which helps me figure out what students already know about narrative writing and what is new for them.
Here are the learning targets on which we developed our resources for RL.3.
Teaching W.6.3 (6th Grade)
6th Grade Standard: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.
6th Grade Learning Targets
- I can write a fictional narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.
- I can write a detailed narrative that includes dialogue, pacing, sequence with phrases and transitions, and description.
- I can use adjectives in my writing to add descriptive details and sensory language to describe the characters, setting, experiences, and events in my story.
- I can write an appropriate conclusion (ending) to the story.
Teaching W.7.3 (7th Grade)
7th Grade Standard: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective techniques, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.
7th Grade Learning Targets
- I can engage the reader with a grabber, a clear plotline, and a strong conclusion that includes a clear resolution to the conflict
- I can use detailed descriptions to develop people, places, and events and use purposeful transitions
Teaching W.8.3 (8th Grade)
8th Grade Standard: Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective techniques, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.
8th Grade Learning Targets
- I can establish a context and point of view and introduce a narrator to engage and orient the reader.
- I can utilize narrative techniques to develop experiences, events, and characters; organize a natural and logical event sequence; use precise words and phrases; use relevant descriptive details and sensory language to capture the action and convey experiences and events.
- I can utilize a variety of transition words, phrases, and clauses to convey sequence signal shifts from one timeframe or setting to another while also showing the relationships among experiences and events.
Going Deep in the Details
The hardest part of the W.3 standard for most students is going to be adding enough details. This is going to be really hard for students in middle school because they don’t fully understand yet just how different people’s minds are.
Students often assume that the reader will understand what they mean, so it takes a lot of feedback for them to realize where the holes are in their writing.
Encourage students to go through a long process of collecting details for their stories before ever really starting to write their narratives.
Then, have them review their details with other people. Encourage the peers to point out the holes in the student’s idea or even in the first draft of their story.
Some of the common holes I have seen include:
- People enter and exit rooms awkwardly or without explanations.
- Not providing enough time and space for characters to move from place to place.
- Very limited or no dialogues or conversations.
- Stunted conversations that don’t flow realistically.
- There is not enough development of the setting or conflict within the exposition and rising action.
- A very limited or simple climax or one that is so outrageous or overblown that it doesn’t make sense within the context or tone of the narrative.
All of these little details are important, so don’t rush the time you give students to develop their narratives. Slow it down, give lots of feedback, and give students lots of prompts to develop the details of their story.
Resources for teaching W.3
When picking resources to help teach W.3, you’ll want to make sure the resource teaches, practices, and reviews the standard at the appropriate level for the students you’re teaching. Since the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade standards are similar, we’ve included similar pieces in both of our W.3 resources for the middle school level, but each has its own examples and passages (if needed). To learn more about them, click on the links below.
The resources include a lesson/activity for each specific learning target or concept and also include assessments, posters, and answer keys.
Activities and Projects for Practicing and Assessing W.3 in Middle School
- Often, the setting of a story is taught with the time and place of the story in mind…but what about the duration of the story? In the 6th-grade resource, we focus on all three pieces as they are all equally important!
- Narrative Writing Toolkit: In both the 7th and 8th-grade resources for this standard, we’ve included a Narrative Writing Toolkit that is full of definitions of narrative writing vocabulary, key concepts, and other things students need to know as they begin on their narrative writing journey. The Narrative Writing Toolkit is available in both the 7th and 8th-grade resources.
- Brainstorming Characters: Before beginning to write, encourage students to get their characters down on paper. Spend time building out the character, their type, as well as their internal and external characteristics. We have a worksheet to help students with this in the 7th-grade unit.
- Focus on Exposition: Students often want to run right through the exposition part of their writing, but this is where the foundation of their entire story lives, so encourage them to slow down here and get a lot of detail and foreshadowing into the exposition of their narratives. In our 7th grade resource, we have students explore how other writers use the exposition of their stories in a full 40-minute, 2-part lesson.
- Timeline of Events: One of the ways to write out the story without actually writing out the story is to lay out the events of the narrative in a timeline. The linear quality of a timeline, like the one we provide in a worksheet in the 8th-grade unit, helps students to see if they need more details or if there are any missing pieces to the flow of their story.
Mastering the standards feels like a huge challenge in middle school ELA, and we understand that. Narrative writing (or any writing for that matter) can take up a huge amount of time in your middle school ELA classroom, and that is why we want to save you as much time and headache as we can by giving you these fully flushed-out resources that will give you the foundation you need to help your students master the middle school ELA standards.