Personal narratives are some of my favorite writings to teach. They’re also super hard for students to grasp.
I like to tie in personal narratives with monologues from theatre. I find this helps hit home the concept that a personal narrative is a small moment in time versus an entire day or experience.
Personal Narrative Ideas: Start with Mentor Texts
Introducing the genre of personal narrative and its characteristics is how I’d start this lesson. I may have students play Four Corners to see what background knowledge I’m working with.
Jabari Jumps seems to make just about every online list of personal narrative mentor texts. It’s also one of the approved mentor texts in my own school district. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s about Jabari, a little boy who is well-prepared for swimming. He then experiences all the emotions when it comes time to jump from the diving board.
Here’s a link to Lucky Little Learners’ blog post on 13 different personal narrative mentor texts you can check out.
Whatever mentor text you use, I suggest a read-aloud and a discussion of the characteristics of the story. I’ve included some guided discussion questions below.
- Was it a large event or a small moment?
- Were we able to visualize the story?
- What helped us see it through the main character’s eyes?
Familiar Monologue Examples
The next step in this lesson is to introduce the concept of monologues. My students are obsessed with Frozen and Hamilton in a huge way. Both of these stories offer monologues.
I love to show the scene from Frozen II where Olaf is retelling all of the plot points from the first Frozen to the people in the forest. It’s a really great example of a monologue: it’s one person talking (if you ignore crowd reactions) to someone else. Plus upper elementary kids still love Olaf.
I also show the scene from The Incredibles where Syndrome is talking to Mr. Incredible in the woods on his private island. There’s a point in the scene where Syndrome realizes he’s delivering a monologue and he comments on it. It’s gold.
And then there’s Hamilton. For you 5th grade teachers who’re covering American History, I love to show the clip of Jonathan Groff as King George III singing “You’ll Be Back” as a musical monologue.
Personal Narrative Ideas: Write & Perform Personal Narrative Monologues
Now that my students are familiar with personal narratives and monologues, I have them write a personal narrative monologue and perform it for the class.
The days dedicated to this are only an additional day than the traditional time given to personal narrative writing. They’re still writing, they just need another day so they can perform.
If your scope and sequence doesn’t allow any wiggle room for more time, you can also have students record themselves performing the monologues and upload them to your LMS.
I love this because they’re writing, but they’re also seeing how their writing can evolve into other forms of expression. And as a bonus, they really love being called playwrights.
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