Narrative Writing Rubric

Happy Sunday! Today I wanted to share the narrative writing rubric that I use in my classroom. Students need to know where their writing stands to understand how to make improvements. I created this rubric to show the students what is expected at each rubric level. Our district has provided us with a teacher rubric for scoring purposes, but we did not have student examples at each performance level. I wanted to post the expectations in my classroom so I decided to create the samples myself with illustration expectations as an additional component.

Our class has discussed each performance level and we have had many conversations about the similarities and differences. We have looked at student writing exemplars (teacher created versions, too!) and have graded them together using the rubric. My students have grasped this concept quite well and I have observed a strong drive to achieve the next level in many of them. The biggest challenge was getting the students to see that both the illustration and the writing needs to be adequate to achieve a score on the rubric. Some of them of course focused mostly on the pictures at first!

Achieving mastery of the first grade narrative writing standard would score a 3 on this particular rubric. Four is considered beyond, two is approaching, one is needing improvement within the standard.

Happy Teaching!