Explain to your students that personal narrative is a retelling of something that they have experienced. Read aloud several good examples of personal narrative to demonstrate the type of writing that you expect them to produce.
Model the writing process from beginning to end. Gather your students together and work with large sheets of chart paper, allowing your students to "eavesdrop" as you proceed through the steps of choosing a topic, pre-writing, drafting, revising and editing.
Demonstrate how to select a good topic for your narrative. Share a short list of several potential topics and allow children to hear your inner debate about which would serve as the best topic for your narrative. Let your students hear you ask yourself which experience, incident or event was most meaningful to you or seems most interesting to write about.
Choose a pre-writing activity such as webbing, listing or drawing. Show the student how pre-writing activities such as these help the writer generate raw material for her narrative. Explain how good personal narrative gives the reader the feeling that he is at the scene. Emphasize that students should "show" rather than "tell," which involves writing with a lot of descriptive detail; pre-writing exercises help us notice the details.
Write your first draft on chart paper so your students can observe the process of sequencing events. As you draft, point out how you are following first-grade rules about capitalization and punctuation. Emphasize that you are being careful to write in complete, coherent sentences and suggest that children offer feedback if there is something about your story that they do not understand.
Revise and edit your piece. Read the piece aloud to demonstrate how to check the piece for flow and to spot any missing words. Ask children if there are ways to make the piece stronger by using more precise or descriptive language. Circle high-frequency words and point out that as first-graders, they should be careful to spell these words correctly. Explain that students should use what they know about letter sounds to approximate the correct spelling of more difficult words.
Prepare a final version of your piece. Emphasize the importance of printing neatly and remind students to use proper spacing between words when they write their own final drafts.