ABSTRACT

Think back to the opening paragraphs of this book’s introductory chapter, in which I describe a workshop I conducted with elementary and middle school literacy teachers on narrative writing and the Common Core State Standards; in this description, I highlight my conversations with two teachers, Alexis and Julie, who have been teaching narrative writing for years, but were uncertain how to do so in the Common Core era. The narrative-writing tools and the corresponding toolkit approach described in this book can resolve the anxieties of teachers like Alexis and Julie, who are unsure of what aspects of narrative writing to focus on in their instruction, and the best instructional methods to use while doing so.