Narrative Basics Lesson 2: Action

About Standards
Introduction
Story - Narrative
Middle years and up
narrative
action
physical action
social action
internal action
environmental action
giving action meaning
sequencing action
blending action
passive voice
active voice
interpersonal action
abstracted action
reaction
summarising action
expanded action
controlling pacing
Purpose
Teach students how to blend different types of action to create richer and more emotionally varied scenes.
Description
Narratives present characters in action. In this lesson, we explore types of action, including physical, social, internal and environmental. We also touch on how writers make action meaningful and the challenges of sequencing action. At the end we bring everything together in a checkpoint piece that features a blend of action types. We use snippets from Jason Reynolds, Jean McKissack, and Celia M. Perez's First Rule of Punk. This lesson contains 10 activities and will take most students 2-3 hours to complete. UPDATE: If you want to assign individual pages from this lesson, search for "action activity".
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