Answer:One year when I was teaching fifth grade I thought it would be a great idea to end our LITERATURE genre

study of MYSTERIES by having the students write a mystery of their own. After six weeks of planning,

conferencing, drafting, editing, drafting, editing, conferencing, editing, re-writing, drafting, planning, drafting,

editing, I was ready to kill myself. I could see the headlines: REAL LIFE MYSTERY: TEACHER DIES

TEACHING MYSTERY UNIT I didn’t literally kill myself, but the amount of work involved did kill a small

part of my brain. In the end, the mysteries were written, most of them anyway, but I think I wrote huge sections

for some students. Most of the mysteries made no sense and they were either way, way, way too long (18

chapters in one case) or way, way, way too short (4 paragraphs). I vowed I would never do it again.

The next year, new fifth graders arrived in my classroom asking, “Are we going to get to write

mysteries like last year’s class? My friend said it was her favorite part of the year!” Sadly, I realized I needed

to do it again. But I needed to do it differently. Students needed a structure, and they needed more practice on

the sub-skills of writing. Since they had been reading mostly novels, they needed to understand what a SHORT

mystery might look like. They needed a model of a five-chapter mystery in which each chapter was about two

double-spaced pages. The whole thing would be total of about 10 double-spaced pages! Once I figured out the

structure, the rest was easy — well, not easy, but much, much more manageable.

That mystery unit taught me more than it taught the students. I learned that when teaching writing —

the creative process is helped by structure. Many authors use a structure to guide their writing and this recipe or

formula is not inherently a bad thing. Also, I learned that this structure can apply to the overall plan or arc of a

piece of writing but it also works for the structure of individual scenes or sentences.

The Sub-Skills of Narrative Writing

Back in 1993, the state of Massachusetts developed a new writing test for fourth graders. The prompt

called for narrative writing. I believe the question was something like:

The summer is the favorite time of year for many children. Children like to do lots of

different things in the summer like swim, ride bikes, PLAY with friends, or something

totally different.

Write a story about a fun time that you had on a summer DAY. Give enough details to

show the reader what happened and why it was fun.

You may use the space below to plan what you are going to write (notes, outlines, other

pre-writing activities).

4

In many of the schools I visited, students struggled mightily to write the multi-paragraph essay the state

wanted. First of all, most students learned from their teachers that they needed to write a “five paragraph

essay.” Their experience with the five paragraph essay led most students to write:

Summer is my favorite season for three reasons. I like it because is it really hot. I like it because we

don’t have school. I like it because I can do fun things like ride my bike. I like all these things. That’s

why I like summer… (and on-and-on until the closer...) THANK you for reading my paper.

The “stories” were by and large a disaster. The first and most obvious problem was that students had

not responded to the prompt. They had interpreted “five paragraph essay” to mean some type of persuasive or

opinion essay. In fact, the prompt wanted narrative writing – the kind of writing in which you tell a story. As a

result, the stories lacked an attention-getting lead, setting, characters, action, dialogue, transitions, and/or