Narrative Assessment: Show What You Know

Today both 7th and 8th grade students completed a writing piece that assessed their knowledge of narrative writing.  The prompt was simple:  Write a personal narrative.

Students dig right in to this task, and each period I had students who wrote until the very last minute.  This assessment will help me understand two pieces of very important information about students as we prepare for our first unit of study:

1. What do they already know about writing narratives?  I don't want to create lessons about skills students already have.
2. What gaps do students have in their understanding of this kind of writing?  My lessons should be created from students' instructional needs.

I'll be using rubrics for narrative writing from the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project .  These rubrics assess the following writing traits for narrative writing:

• Overall:  the writing piece as a whole
•  Lead:  what the writer establishes at the beginning
• Transitions:  how the writer moves the reader through the story
• Ending:  how the writer creates a sense of closure
• Organization:  understanding of how narrative writing is structured
• Elaboration:  the development of story elements
• Craft:  the intertwining of the story elements
• Spelling
• Punctuation & Sentence Structure

Within the next couple of weeks, I'll be collecting much more information about the readers and writers in my classroom, and be planning for the first units of study!