Now, the students in English 1 have gotten used to the different threads in the course: vocabulary, the standard reading exercise, extensive reading, the writing units, and others. Most recently, the students have been reading, analyzing, and producing different types of narratives beginning with the recount where they tell a personal story about something interesting, memorable, or otherwise impactful that occurred in their lives.
As one example of this text type, the students read/watched a recount narrative and learned that this is an example of a multimodal text; a text that contains more than one type of media. In this case, the text has text, video, and audio with each helping to create meaning in different ways.
Armed with examples like this, the students created their own recounts, making sure that they included a complicating action in the narrative—something that makes the story compelling or interesting—and checked and improved each others’ work through peer review.
Now, the class is working on their own fictional narratives like fairy tales and practicing creative writing skills such as brainstorming, using descriptive language, and considering how to make a text interesting for the audience. I’m looking forward to reading what they come up with!