Ideas and Hooks: Personal Narrative

Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling

• Find a story with a great hook. Rewrite the hook so that it is very boring, such as, “My name is (insert name here) and I live in house. I have a family and go to school”.
• Explain to your students that you are going to play a game, sort of like "American Idol." You are going to provide two “contestants,” or hooks, and they are going to judge which one is better and why.
• Discuss the criteria for a good hook — how will they be evaluating the hooks or contestants?
• Read the boring version of the story hook to your students and have them give their assessment, calling on students who want to act as judges.
• Read the original version of the hook and ask for students to comment as judges.

Guided practise

• Explain that there are different strategies that authors use to draw readers into texts. For example, written works can start with a quotation, a belief, a bold statement, an anecdote, an interesting fact, or a question.
• Have students work in pairs or small groups to examine hooks used in the texts in your classroom.
• Give groups 10 minutes to examine texts and have them choose their favorite.
• Have groups share their favorites with the class and state why they selected it.
• As groups share, try to identify some of the strategies that the authors used and generate a class list.

Independent working time

• Distribute the worksheet Great Writing Starts with Golden Ideas. Walk students through the instructions and then have them generate an initial idea bank.
• Ask students to work independently to select one idea from their bank, then create an idea map to help identify details and emotions from the experience they have chosen to write about.
• Students should then craft two to three different hooks for their personal narrative using the strategies they discovered. (Have students refer to the list from the previous exercise.)