Exploring what happened in the classroom as a teacher used a whole language approach with her culturally varied, urban fourth-grade students, this report tells the story of a unit on personal, narrative writing which occurred from April to June. The report describes how the teacher established routines to make the unit work, and how the teacher felt that whole language teaching was exhausting yet personally rewarding and effective. The report also notes that the students reinforced the teacher's perceptions--they enjoyed the experience and were discovering how to compose and what it means to be authors. The report provides a formal analysis of students' writings to give a developmental picture of their writing abilities. The report suggests that students progressed in their writing abilities because the teacher provided support and scaffolding for their learning by reinforcing achievements in writing and helping students extend their ideas. A discussion of the importance of the involvement of school faculty in the study, a description of the expressive autobiographic interview, the interview schedule, writing prompts, students' advice sheets, and transcripts of students' writings are attached. Contains 53 references. (Author/RS)