Interactive Introduction to Personal Narratives Featuring Story Corps

This resource is available to use with the Pear Deck Add-On in Google Slides/Powerpoint. It begins with a bell-ringer about oral tradition, which I've found most middle schoolers don't know about!

From there, the students are lead through an interactive discussion about storytelling, why stories are vital to our humanity, and how oral tradition eventually led to our writing down our stories.

This resource features a number of personal, animated stories from Story Corps (all around 2-3 minutes long). You can skip through any that might seem to difficult, but I found that 7th and 8th graders could easily handle all of them. They sat in rapt silence during the stories, which I always use to show them just how magnetic storytelling can be!

There are prompts to analyze the stories, the writing, and discussion. The kids always leave class wanting more and having a lot to talk about. Their wheels are already turning for what they'd like to write about themselves.

This is how I introduce personal narrative writer's workshop. Enjoy!