How To Use Narrative Stories To Help Students In Writing?

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Clarisse and Daniel wove their narrative storylines into persuasive advertisements, including the description of the items, targeting specific audiences. This activity also prepared the students to think about objects in a personified way and to think about purpose and audience in their writing.
Our next step in the activity transitioned to writing about iconic symbols in young adult literature. Students worked collaboratively to create J. Peterma catalogs for the texts they were reading in their literature circle/book study groups. Students created catalogs for Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, Walter Deal Myers's Monster, and Ben Mikaelsen's Touching Spir Bear. The Touching Spirit Bear book club created an advertisement for many important objects and event Cartier Replica in the text, most notably, the Ancestor Rock:

In a place where cold, salty water sweeps onto this rocky shore of a long forgotten island, Tlingit elder chisel away at a mountainside, freeing away tools for their tribal rituals. The Ancestor Rock is more that rock; it is truth, ...
... introspection, and justice. Why pushing it up steep hillsides, the Ancestor Rock serves as a mentor and protector. And yet, when it is let go to fall quickly down the hill it had recently climbed, is forgiveness. Ancestor Rock, No. 232, One size of all, Colors will vary. $199.00
Not only did the activity emphasize purpose ant audience in writing, but it also demonstrated how written texts do not always need to be created in isolation. Persuasive, descriptive, and narrative texts can be interwoven to create a powerful companion to visual images. Through the development of their book club catalogs, the students touched on the important themes of each novel as well as described specific setting details and character traits of important characters. Collaboratively, the students created meaning from the text and worked together to create a project with print and nonpoint texts that symbolized their collective understanding of the novel.

Gee (2000) stated that when creating meaning from texts, the human mind is social. Additionally, as the mind engages in thinking, it distributes information "across other people and various symbols, tools objects and technologies" (para. 6). If the culture teem are immersed in revolves around the visual and the media, their minds recognize the patterns created b) these images, creating a persuasive argument for incorporating these patterns within the classroom. Get wrote that "Thinking and using language is an active matter of assembling the situated meanings that you need for action in the world" (para. 12). Taking these meanings and showing students how to apply then both inside and outside the classroom can be an effective instructional tool.

A study by Pompe (1996) about popular culture's influence on young consumers upheld her convictions as to why it is so influential on students. She found that the pleasures provided by these visually oriented, texts were deep in nature, rather than superficial; that consumers' desires were powerful influences Tag Heuer Replica Watches on what the popular media produced; that viewers and listeners of audiovisual texts just as actively made meaning as readers of print text; and that teachers and students could satisfy their own desires while they were learning about the desires of others. It is this powerful influence 'that makes popular media texts important additions to the classroom. By including elements of popular culture, teachers can tap into the patterns students' minds already recognize, which makes transitioning them to more traditional texts much more effective.