Sharon Feingold

www.what2.how2

A planning strategy for Narrative Story Writing

www.what2.how2

• Students who have difficulty with planning and monitoring during writing benefit from specific support strategies

• The strategy of www.what2.how2 assists with Narrative Story Writing by:

1. Scaffolding the planning process through answering structured questions that serve to generate each element of the story; and

2. Organizing and sequencing the story

www.what2.how2

Question Guide for Graphic Organizer• Who are the main characters?

• When does the story take place?

• Where does the story take place?

• What does the main (& other) characters do or want to do?

• What happens when they try to do it?

• How does the story end

• How does the main character and other characters feel?

www.what2.how2

who when where_______________ _______________ ___________________________ _______________ ___________________________ _______________ ___________________________ _______________ ____________

what what how how______________ ______________ _____________ __________________________ ______________ _____________ __________________________ ______________ _____________ __________________________ ______________ _____________ ____________

Method

• Initial acquisition and application of this planning strategy is modeled by teacher.

• Strategy used after teacher activates background knowledge and students are ready to move to planning stage of narrative writing.

• Graphic Organizer used as a prewriting tool to answer prompts.

• Students participate in planning process with Graphic Organizer and prompts repeatedly until they know well and can use just the mnemonic.

Benefits of this Planning Strategy

• Allows students to see typical sequence of narrative genre.

• Results in longer, more complete, and qualitatively improved stories.

• Research-based strategy for middle school that may be used to measure students’ progress via a pretest, posttest, and generalization of skill via writing probes.

Applications

• Students can view or choose a picture and then write about it.

• Students can add an additional chapter for a story they have read.

• Mnemonic can be used to have students evaluate if a writer included all parts of a good narrative story.

• Students may use with partners in other classes.

• I am going to start reading a story aloud. • (In your classroom, you will also give a copy of

the story to students, who can follow along.)• Each time you hear one of the elements from

our chart, please raise your hand. I will call on students and we will use your answers to fill out our chart.

• (Teacher reads excerpt and calls on students who have raised their hands to identify elements.)

Let’s evaluate a narrative with www.what2.how2

References

• http://kc.vanderbilt.edu/casl/powwww.html

• Patel, Pooja, and Leslie Laud. "Integrating a Story Writing Strategy into a Resource Curriculum." Teaching Exceptional Children (March/April 2007).