To prepare Year 5 EAL students for narrative writing, we investigated a strong story model, over a series of lessons. We did this to find important structural and meaning-making tools we could use in our own writing. The visual mentor text we chose to explore was Fireflies by Julie Brinckloe.
We worked hard to understand the story's contents.
We first carefully read through the story, discussed new vocabulary we encountered and made personalised notes to help us remember their meanings. Sometimes we chose to make our notes in English and sometimes we chose to do this in our home languages or through pictures: however we could remember them best. We also were on the hunt for interesting similes and sound words that we might also use in our own stories. We underlined these meaning-making tools in different colours.
We also created an anchor chart with our teacher to show our knowledge of simple regular and irregular past tense, as we need to use this tense accurately in our own stories. We then searched for these past tense forms in the story, and highlighted regular, irregular and other forms in different colours.
Finally, we mapped out the structural arc of the Fireflies story to see how its key events were organised. We can learn from this arc about how we might plan our own stories out.
We also thought deeply about the closing message in the story, when the little boy who had caught the fireflies set them free, so they could live. We are very happy to have made this story into a reference book that we can use to enhance our own story writing in Writing Workshop.
