Books for Teaching Successful Autobiography Writing

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From Unit Plan: Writing an Autobiography

Prior to assigning my students a writing task, I like to lessen their anxiety about the writing process. These professional books give instructions on how to do just that and include fun and creative skill-building tasks that build better writers.

The following books are available in The Teacher Store.

Narrative Writing: Mini-Lessons "Strategies" Activities by Tara McCarthy
A variety of mini-lessons in this book help engage students as they begin a writing task.

Quick Tip: Refer to this book when creating a narrative writing assignment. You will find that all areas of narrative writing are covered.

350 Fabulous Writing Prompts: Thought-Provoking Springboards for Creative, Expository, and Journal Writing by Jacqueline Sweeney
Students become better writers by responding to this collection of interesting prompts.

Quick Tip: Take five prompts for the entire week and answer them yourself before giving them to the students on a daily basis.

325 Creative Prompts For Personal Journals: To Help Students Become Better Writers by J.A. Senn
Help students become better journal writers by having them respond to these engaging journal prompts.

Quick Tip: Have students keep a book of journal entries to use as a model for making progress in the area of writing.

Hands-On Writing Activities That Get Kids Ready for the Writing Assessments by Susan Van Zile
Lessons such as the Great Paragraph Race, Super-Size Paragraphs, Building Paragraph Models, and lots more get students excited about writing.

Quick Tip: I used the guided imagery lesson on pages 12-13 in Lesson 3 of this unit to help students reflect on their individual writing process.

 

Look for the following books in your school library.

Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read and Write by Patricia M. Cunningham and Richard L. Allington
Great tips get students interested in reading and writing. Includes methods to help ease writing anxiety.

Quick Tip: Teachers should read this book before attempting any reading or writing project. This is a teacher must-have.

Create-an-Autobiography: Writing a Personal Story by Eleanor W. Hoomers, Ph.D.
Excellent resource for writing autobiography lessons for grades 4-8. You will find pages and pages of fill-ins and writing prompts.

Quick Tip: If you do not have the time to teach the Life Map in this unit, use this professional book to select handouts that apply to the type of autobiography that you want your students to write. These handouts can be done once a week and saved into the student's writing folder. When they are ready to write the autobiography, your students will have pages of information to use.

Books for Teaching Autobiographical & Narrative Writing
Teacher created book list.

Joan Novelli’s Writing Workshop
Suggests using a lesson in autobiographical writing to get students acquainted at the beginning of the school year. The lesson plan includes reading autobiographies and modeling the writing process.

Creative Writing Terminology: Parent Primer
Refresh your memory with this list of creative writing terminology that your kids learn in school. Discusses the elements of a story and covers key creative writing terms.

LESSON PLAN	Best Part of Me Describes a beginning of the school year lesson in which students identify their favorite parts of themselves through descriptive poetry and...
UNIT PLAN	Writing Autobiographies This comprehensive assignment in autobiographical writing helps students hone their state-standard writing skills, while enabling teachers to...
ONLINE ACTIVITY	Home | Write It Write It is the premiere site for kids' and teens' writing instruction and online publishing. In genres like poetry, essays, short fiction,...