Comparing Texts: New Passages!

This year I've been working on new Article Response sets to use as ongoing practice and homework with sixth graders. They have worked wonderfully all year and I'm thrilled to share them.

All of the response sets are set up in a similar pattern: cover sheet, summarizing prompt, response prompt, and text. Each also has a comprehension quiz.

At the start of the year, I planned to send these home as homework. As the year has progressed I've changed my thinking! We start class with ten minutes of independent reading followed by ten minutes of working on the texts and responses. Some days I do a mini-lesson about summarizing or writing a response, while on other days students partner read. A two-week span for each packet gives us enough time to have thoughtful conversations without feeling pressured to produce.

"Damon and Pythias" and "The Two Travelers"

The latest two sets have been focused on comparing narratives. I think that comparing texts is such a meaningful, authentic purpose for close reading. When kids read two texts and spontaneously offer comparisons, I know that good things are happening!


This text set pairs a retelling of "Damon and Pythias" with a version of the fable by Aesop "The Two Travelers". Both of these stories examine the meaning of loyalty and friendship, but in very different ways! For students dealing with sixth grade drama, the concept of loyalty is fascinating to discuss.

We acted out both stories in class. Acting out stories helps readers to grasp the action and better understand the events. When it came time to summarize "Damon and Pythias", students really were able to consider which events were important to the outcome of the story and which were not! The fable "The Two Travelers" teaches a lesson about friendship through a non-example, and raises an interesting question for students--did the bear in the story really talk?

"Damon and Pythias" is also the basis for the 2003 film Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. If you are working on comparing texts, this is a great opportunity to compare a story to a film.

"The Elves and the Shoemaker" and "The Magical Cyber Elf"

This text set has been perfect for reviewing key content for standardized testing! I started with thinking about the classic fairy tale "The Elves and the Shoemaker". How could this story be translated for modern times? Because I am currently up to my ears in yearbook work the modern story "The Magical Cyber Elf" came to mind.

There have been so many great concepts to review with this text set. We used "The Elves and the Shoemaker" to review the parts of a plot diagram and talk about theme. Then, we used "The Magical Cyber Elf" to discuss point of view and how a shifting point of view can influence the unfolding of events in a story. We had some great conversations about how the themes of the two stories are very similar, even though the settings and conflicts differ.

If you try these text sets, let me know what your students think!

Examining Character Motives

   Why do characters do what they do?

    This is a big question for intermediate readers. Sometimes, they don't even know the motives behind their own actions! (Dealing with an indoor recess squabble--"Why did you do that?" Student: "I don't know!) 
    Because our reading homework text this week focused on "Theseus and the Minotaur", I decided this was the perfect time to examine this question. After all, there are big questions of motive in "Theseus and the Minotaur"! 

Implied or Stated?

    A character's motive can be implied or stated--and it's important for readers to know the difference. I modeled reading to find the difference between implied motives and stated motives with our read-aloud, Fair Weather. I just love this book! It seems that no matter what I want to teach, I can find it in the books of Richard Peck.

This year I've been keeping a daily log of our reading with the Promethean board, which makes a handy flipchart and a great way for us to keep track of our thinking as we read. After we read the day's chapter, we talked about the actions of the characters. What were their motives--their reasons for doing what they did?

A quick chart showing action and motive can illustrate this. Intermediate readers sometimes try to write the same statement for both action and motive. This reveals a bit of where they are developmentally---they confuse action with reason behind the action. In the chart to the right, it took a bit of discussion before students stopped restating Granddad's action and started guessing at his motives.

We put question marks behind these motives to show that we were guessing at them. These motives are implied in the text, and as readers we had to make inferences to figure them out.  This contrasts with Mama's motives for sending Lottie and Rosie to Chicago--this motive is stated right there in the text, as she wants to "nip it in the bud" Lottie's romance with a neighboring farmhand.

In a novel, readers have to play a long inference game, and we might have to wait a few chapters before we see how our inferences pan out. That's why keeping track of our thinking all along is so important!

Independent Practice

Students then worked with the familiar story "Theseus and the Minotaur" to make some guesses about character motives. (The story and the page are available in February Reading Homework.) I like having a partially filled out chart to scaffold students for success. This activity led to rich discussions between partners. Why did Ariadne betray her father? Why did Theseus go to Athens as a volunteer? 

Most importantly, students had to go back to the text to find evidence to support their thinking about motives. A few groups had put their stories away and tried to complete the task without looking back to the text. I didn't intervene at first, hoping that they would get to a point at which they would realize independently that they had to use the text. Fortunately, they did! And it's so much better for students to come to this conclusion on their own than for it to just be something that I tell them.

I knew the lesson was successful when students started thinking beyond the text. "Why did King Minos build the labyrinth for the Minotaur, anyway?" one student asked. Their version of the myth did not go into detail about this. "And why did he leave Ariadne behind?" another asked. Hopefully once Percy Jackson's Greek Heroes comes out they will be able to find their own answers to these questions. 

The lesson had another layer of success--suddenly students wanted mythology books to read. Any lesson that leads to independent reading books flying off the shelves is brilliant in my book!

More on the reader-based inferences used to figure out character motives can be found in Chapter 6 of The Forest and the Trees.

Improving story summaries by summarizing dialogue

When it comes time to summarize stories, many intermediate readers just don't know what to do with the dialogue. They know that dialogue is important, and that it carries information. But they also know that they shouldn't include too much dialogue in a summary.

The great news is that teaching readers how to summarize dialogue is pretty fun. "Don't include dialogue in a summary" is easy to say. But what should readers do instead?

This is what we practice! Short, funny skits are the ideal tool for this.

Here is one that students read in small groups after they finished their passage-based essays. You can imagine the laughter that spread through the room as students progressed further into the script!

So then students perform the script, and we talk about how to summarize the dialogue. What happened? With imaginary rewind buttons we can have the performers repeat parts of the script as necessary--very fun--and we have been known to mute them on occasion.

A list of words to summarize dialogue is helpful. I love word lists in general because they are such an efficient way to build word knowledge quickly. Many readers will return to word lists weeks and months after a lesson to find just the right word for an activity.

If you have students struggling with summarizing stories, try spending some time on summarizing dialogue. You'll hear some interesting insights and have great conversations!

Links
Summarizing Stories  includes more activities for summarizing dialogue, as well as the script and word list included here.

Story Elements: Looking at Characters

This summer, as I've listened to the last of the Harry Potter series and started The Lost Hero with my family, I've enjoyed our conversations about the characters, the conflicts, and the setting. Each year, I try to replicate these kinds of conversations in my classroom.

Teaching story elements is a great way to begin. When kids can identify story elements, they can pick out the parts of the story that fit together and start to talk about them coherently. Who are the characters? What is the setting? What is the main problem in the story?

Of course, teaching story elements needs to go much deeper than simple identification. Filling out a story map quickly becomes a dull classroom routine without an inspiring conversation to go along with it. In fourth grade, I like to ask students provoking questions about characters. These questions stimulate our discussion and help students to see story elements as being more than just disassembling a story.

When we have these conversations, I can judge from student responses where to go next. Sometimes I do hear the sound of crickets. This tells me that I've tried to move too far too fast, and that kids need some time before we can have this particular conversation. Sometimes their responses remind me of a fabulous book that I just have to share--a character who is similar to one of their favorites, or a character who acts the opposite of what is expected.

Most importantly, these kinds of questions bring a spark of "what if?" to our classroom...a spark that lights up the room with the love of reading.

Notes

-My Story Elements PowerPoint is a classic that I do come back to, year after year.

-I wrote some fun Story Elements Readers Theatre scripts for my students to share. 

-You can try out the activity Camping Together for free over on Frolyc. Try it out if you have student iPads! (The story is also available in my Visualizing packet.)

-Analyzing Story Elements is finally ready. Four new stories with before reading pages, questions, and activities to help students understand and analyze story elements.

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The Challenges and Delights of Teaching Theme

Although they might seem quite different, teaching theme and teaching summarizing have some similarities. Both require teachers to help students see beyond the clutter of details to reach for the gist of the story. An understanding of theme enhances a student's summary of a story--and knowing how to summarize helps readers to infer themes. When planning for a school year, it almost becomes a chicken and egg problem--which should we teach first?

For me, the answer is neither. And both. (This is what makes me so frustrating to the people I work with!) Looking at summarizing narratives and theme as an ongoing exploration instead of a one-and-done unit leads to much deeper learning and far better discussions. These ideas are so intertwined that they cannot be reduced to step one, step two, step three teaching. Instead, they can become a shared foundation for a new community and classroom.

Just like teaching summarizing, teaching theme can be frustrating. Many young readers are very literal and confuse theme with plot. After all, many authors never state a theme directly. It can be confusing for young readers to "find" something that, from their perspective, isn't even there!

Theme bulletin board: I like to display common themes on a bulletin board that I keep up for most of the year. My formatted theme set is available free from Slideshare, or you can make a more beautiful version that fits in with your classroom decor. As we read different stories, we write titles on notecards and add them to our bulletin board. This helps students to see that stories with very different plots can share themes--an idea which will become important as we compare stories later.

Read aloud: Starting the year with many short read-alouds helps us to think about summarizing and theme at the same time. I don't map out my read-alouds weeks in advance--instead, I have a handy selection of my favorite books that I choose from each day. I just never know what will be happening in the classroom and which book will be the best match for our mood!

Theme reference page: Giving students a list of themes helps them to match themes to stories all year long. It is always wonderful to see students looking at their theme list on their own.

Stories with stated and unstated themes: It is so important for students to see examples of both. I like to suggest to students that they reread the last page or paragraph of a story to look for a stated theme--if the author included it, chances are it's somewhere at the end! 

Theme Resources
Theme Unit: This includes three stories and activities to help students recognize and explain themes in stories. I don't usually write about the stories I've written because I'm secretly afraid that someone will tell me I shouldn't write stories anymore. Isn't that silly? One of the stories ("The Arguing Knights and the Hungry Dragon) is a version of a tale that I made up for my sons--here is the original bit from an old blog post. Another story is a retelling of a Grimm fairy tale, while the last, "Evening Adventure", was written after my students fell in love with metafiction. 

Theme PowerPoint: This is a very simple introduction to theme. 

Theme is a challenge for students, but delightful in the end. After all, theme is what literature is all about! Reading stories from different authors and different places that show the same aspects of human experiences makes us all more human. Sharing that experience with 25 other people is just magical.


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Picture Books for Summarizing Stories

Picture books are a great way to help students summarize. After an engaging shared read, teachers and students together can work to summarize the story. This helps students to learn about how to find important events, which details to include (and which ones to skip!), and how to use academic language to write a skillful summary.

Can I Play Too? by Mo Willems is fun for readers of all ages. There is a problem presented in the story, an attempted solution that doesn't work at all (kids love this page), and a happy ending.

The combination of dialogue and pictures removes all temptation for kids to copy events from the text. Instead, they need to translate what happens on the page into new words. Perfect for summarizing!

With older students, this book is a great way to introduce theme and try to weave a theme into a summary. Would it be best to put the theme at the beginning? Or at the end?


Shortcut by Donald Crews is one book that I would not be able to teach without. I use it for so many things--personal narratives, character emotions, point of view, and summarizing. Like Can I Play Too?, the pictures carry a great deal of weight in the story. This book really shows the flatness of a summary versus a narrative as a finished summary of this book includes the main events, but carries none of the suspense and excitement of the original. This is definitely a book that you will love to have on your bookshelf.

Mole and the Baby Bird by Marjorie Newman looks as if it is meant for a very young reader. However, many readers can identify with the main character's desire to keep a wild bird as a pet. This is a good book to read with students who are struggling with how to represent dialogue in a summary. How can we translate the character's words into sentences? This book is also helpful to use to review the difference between summarizing and retelling. Many students identify so closely with the events in the book that they want to include every detail in a summary. Which events can be deleted, and why?

The King's Equal by Katherine Paterson is one of the first "magic books" that I shared with groups of children. I read it aloud to campers at bedtime during one of my three summers as a camp counselor...it was the perfect length to read a chapter each night. Written like a fairy tale, this story is a perfect length for chunk summarizing, or summarizing bits of a story at a time. Try writing a summary of each chapter with students. Then, at the end of the book, look at the chunk summaries all together. Do they represent the entire book? Would it be better to rewrite a summary of the text as a whole? These questions help readers to think deeply about how a story unfolds, and how to represent these plot complications in a summary. (I wrote an entire set of activities for this book--you can find it here.)

You can find more activities for summarizing stories in this unit, Summarizing Stories, from TeachersPayTeachers. For more on summarizing, check out my book, Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling.

What books do you like to use to teach summarizing stories?

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Summarizing Stories

Summarizing a narrative seems like it should be easy. After all, stories are told in chronological order. We experience life in chronological order. Stories have a clear beginning, middle, and end.

However, anyone who has ever read student summaries of stories knows that this is not always an easy skill. Sometimes a student summary reveals that a student is reading with shallow comprehension, not attending to place names or character names. Sometimes a student summary shows that a student did not understand how the pieces of a story fit together. And sometimes a summary reveals that a student is struggling with deciding which information is important and which details are not important.

As I work with students to summarize stories, I keep these ideas in mind:

Here are some fun classroom activities that you can use to teach students how to summarize stories.

Retold in 60 Seconds: Can you retell a story in 2 minutes? 60 seconds? 40 seconds? This activity is fun for everyone and really helps readers to consider which events and details can be left out, and which ones must be included.

Solving the Retelling Problem, Part 1: Some of my favorite resources for getting kids started with retelling.

Solving the Retelling Problem, Part 2: Struggling readers need lots of support as they manipulate figures to retell a story. This anecdote explains how I coached a reader through this.

Collapsing Lists of Events: When student summaries are too wordy, they often benefit from learning how to collapse lists of events.

Summarizing Stories: This unit has resources for teaching students how to summarize dialogue, collapse lists of events, and summarize parts of stories.


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Text Features: Narratives

It can be easy to overlook teaching the text features of narratives. After all, kids usually seem to have an easier time understanding narratives. Also, the text features of novels and stories are not usually as obvious as the text features of expository text.

But young readers, especially those making the leap into books without many pictures, need to learn how to navigate narrative text features. During read aloud, I've been showing students some of the features of the books we've been sharing.

New paragraph for change of speaker: While it is obvious to skilled readers, young readers often have trouble  tracking the speaker in a conversation. Recognizing that authors show the speaker by starting a new paragraph helps readers to understand who is talking.

Breaks to show change of time or place: When the action in a narrative shifts, writers often signal this with a space. This tells a reader to be prepared for a change.

Different fonts to signal point of view shift: Many stories are told by alternating narrators. Authors usually show this with different fonts or styles. In The Magic Thief, for example, there are occasional excerpts from Nevery's journal. These are printed on gray paper with italic text. Readers need to be able to recognize the print features that point to the narrator shift.

Dates in diaries: When a narrative is told through a diary format, the author shows the passage of time with dates. These are usually written in a bold print to draw the reader's eye.

Looking at these narrative text features is helping my students to add features to their writing, as well. Today, a student said, "Hey." He waited patiently at my elbow until I finished with answering another student's question. Then he showed me his journal. "I'm having two people talk in my story. And I'm using a different kind of writing to show that they are different people. Look." His handwritten attempt at a different kind of font was to make the r's backwards! What a creative way to personalize the text feature.