Understanding Narratives: Story Events

    Supporting all learners in a mixed ability classroom can be a daunting challenge. Over the years,
I've found that having the right materials makes a huge difference! When I'm teaching narratives, my go-to tool is a simple set of events from the story.
    These event cards are so useful! Differentiation is quick, easy, and meaningful, as event cards have so much potential for helping students to zoom in on a story and read closely.

Preparing Event Cards

    Event cards are simple to prepare. Just make a single-column table in Word and type the events from the story in order. Use the same number of lines for each cell to keep your final cards the same size. (I find that a 16-point Georgia with three lines per cell work well.) Remember that it's almost impossible to cut a single line cell!
    Depending on your students, you may want to make your events simple, or more detailed. Be sure to include a sentence to establish the setting and the characters.
    When I'm ready to use my cards, I photocopy them on some cardstock and trim the edges at the paper cutter. The kids can do the rest of the cutting! I store cards in envelopes or clear plastic bags in the hopes that I will find them again the next year. (Narrator's voice: She won't.) I never make enough for everyone in the class, because I want students to have to share! Groups of 2-3 are best to make sure that everyone gets to handle the events.

Sequencing

    At the most basic level, the event cards are great for helping students to sequence the events in a story. This week, students read a drama from our literature anthology. Putting events from the drama in order helped students to piece together the action.
    Here's where these cards are great for differentiation! It's fascinating to listen in on the conversations that students have. As they argue about which event comes before that one, they often can't resist going back to the text to prove their points.
    Groups finish this task at different times, of course, and so I always put an extension question on the board. In this case, it was: "Read through the event cards with your partner. How is this reading experience different from reading the story in the drama format?"
   

Understanding Parts of a Plot

     Event cards are also perfect for talking about how a plot unfolds. This is an important standard for sixth grade, and one that requires lots of productive conversation.
     Using event cards is so much friendlier for students than filling out a plot diagram! A mistake in ordering doesn't mean tedious erasing and rewriting--instead, it's just a simple swap of the cards. Watching my students piece together the events of a story helped me to see how their understanding of plot is developing and how they see the different pieces come together.

Character Changes

     If students are having trouble talking about how characters change over the course of a plot, event cards can be helpful tools! Events provide anchors to help students recall the sequence and understand what happens when. Sometimes students who struggle to respond verbally can hold onto an event card and explain how the character changed in response to what occurs. For students with retrieval and executive functioning issues, having manipulatives for reading can be just the scaffold they need for higher order thinking.

Have you tried story event cards? What have you noticed with your learners?
   

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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Start the School Year with a Focus on Dialogue

In our curriculum, we start the school year with stories and story elements. I love this beginning as it helps us to talk about big ideas like theme and summarizing. But I also realize that, to help students figure out these big ideas, sometimes we need to focus on smaller details.

One of these small details is dialogue. In a story, dialogue can serve many purposes. Sometimes dialogue shows us insight into a character's personality or motives. Dialogue can also move the story forward and reveal information. Skipping over dialogue would lead to a fractured reading experience.

And yet...many young readers have great trouble in figuring out who is speaking in dialogue! The tiny clues to skilled readers use to match speaker to speech are invisible to many young readers. They don't notice the paragraph breaks or the empty white space at the end of lines. They can't track split dialogue. When speaker tags are not included, they have trouble following the back-and-forth of a typical conversation.

Figuring out who is speaking is a kind of text-based inference. Readers need to combine the clues in the text with their background knowledge of how text works. And this is hard! Even readers who are on and above grade-level can struggle with dialogue. 

1. Find out what kids can do with reading dialogue
I like to sit with kids as they are reading. Sometimes I listen to students read, and sometimes we read aloud together. During these conversations, I ask, "Who is speaking?" or "How do you know who is talking at this point?" These conversations help me to figure out the sub-conscious rules that students are or are not using to figure out who is speaking.

2. Model understanding who is speaking by displaying read-aloud text
With a document projector or overhead projector, show students the text that you are reading aloud. I like to make little sticky note tags or even little sketches of the characters to display at the same time. Then, I go back and forth to show who is speaking at each point. It's fun to engage students in this as well.


3. Label dialogue in text
This requires some colored pencils. Give students a copy of a short piece of text, and talk explicitly about the rules of dialogue. What does it mean when a new paragraph begins? How can we tell that a person is still speaking? Underline dialogue by different characters in different colors. 

You can extend the conversation by talking about what the dialogue reveals. Does it show us what characters are like? Reveal details of the plot? An example of this activity is included in the Literature Circle Materials below.




In the past I saved some of these lessons for later in the year. This year, though, I think that I will face them early on. Understanding the little rules of print and the conventions that authors follow will only help us as we begin our exploration of stories and narratives.

Some other lessons for teaching about text-based inferences and understanding dialogue can be found in my book The Forest and The Trees.

Character Traits and Emotions: Making Inferences: This unit includes an activity in which students write dialogue to show character traits.

Text-Based Inferences and More: This pack includes more resources for teaching text-based inferences.

Picture Books for Teaching Theme

I like to use picture books to teach theme--just as I like to use picture books to help students summarize stories. Here are some of my favorites. (Yes, I use the same books year after year. We don't have much of a book budget, and I order a few more copies of my favorites every year to build up to a class set. For that reason, I'm drawn to paperbacks.)

Can you just take any book off the shelf and use it for teaching theme? Yes and no. Every story has some kind of theme, but some are harder to find than others. Also, some stories point to only one theme. I prefer to teach with stories that have multiple themes. These stories yield some rich discussions as students try to support their thinking.

Those Shoes
This is a sweet story of a boy who wants "those shoes", but can't afford them. It resonates with my students and is an example of how a small, slice-of-life story can still carry a theme.

Students like to try to wordsmith different themes for this story, but the concrete plot line makes it easy for them to support a theme that works. This inexpensive paperback is a great choice for a classroom library or teacher bookshelf.



Weslandia
Every time I teach this book I love it a little more! Wesley's journey from tormented victim to intrepid adventurer is a wonder to behold, and Paul Fleischman is just an amazing writer. The kids love the illustrations as well.

Just looking at Wesley's changes in the pictures gives readers a strong insight into the theme of the story. This is another book that resonates with students, and leads to some interesting discussions about the theme.  (I also have a set of resources for this book over on TpT.)


How I Learned Geography
This book is one that I revisit throughout the year, as we look at maps in our geography unit, as we work on personal narratives, and as we explore theme. It is more of a memoir and is alternately classified as "autobiographical" or a "fictional recasting".

Whatever the line between fiction and reality, this book is great to share. My kids think it is interesting that our home state of Pennsylvania is included in a list of faraway places--they have never considered that their everyday ordinary is someone else's distant exotic. Students often have different ideas about the theme. Some bring up the event of the father buying the map instead of buying food, while others focus on the narrator's use of imagination.

City Green
This is another book which has character change at the heart. It would make a nice companion book to Weslandia, as City Green also shows plants making a difference to people's lives. Students passionately argue for various themes in this story, depending on whether they focus on the character of Old Many Hammer or Marcy. I love it when they can support their thinking!

Beautiful Oops
Students love this book! It really shows how a mistake can be turned into something positive. This book has a stated theme, which leads us into a discussion of paraphrasing versus quoting. Should we put the theme into our own words? Should we use quotation marks to show that we are stating the words of the author? These questions are just perfect for beginning of year fourth graders.


There are so many other great books that you can use to teach theme. What are your favorites?



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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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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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Story Synthesis: Best Activity Ever!

There are some activities that transcend classrooms, ages, and ability levels. These are the golden activities that have big ideas that can be explored and examined again and again. Even better are the amazing activities that don't require a great deal of preparation.

The Story Synthesis is one of those activities. It's very simple--I learned about it from a kindergarten teacher. But I've done it again and again, with different groups of students, and it never fails to captivate and engage them.

The basic idea 
Split the class into groups. One half of the class creates characters, and one half creates settings. They do this apart from one another, preferably in secret. (If you say that something is "Top Secret", it instantly becomes alluring and exciting!) Then, they get together. They have to introduce the characters to the setting and create a story. What kind of conflict could arise from this situation?

This year's version
This year, I had students work in pairs to create either settings or characters. We kept the characters hidden in envelopes over the several days that it took us to create them. The settings were on large pieces of poster board and were kept in a drawer.

After students worked on either characters or settings, it was time for them to get together! I had made the groups several weeks ago (and I still had the paper that I had written them down on!), so even I was surprised at how things turned out. There were laughs and groans as the groups were created. Two girls who worked on SuperDog and Hero Fairy (best character ever!) were paired with an underwater setting. The "army guy medics" were sent to a medieval castle.

Exploring conflict and character
And this led to some interesting conversations. What kind of conflict could occur with SuperDog and Hero Fairy? How would the underwater setting affect the conflict? Which character was the protagonist? How could the conflict in the story be classified? This year, I did make a quick little sheet to give students some guidance as they worked to answer these questions. But the activity could easily be scaled down for younger students.

Playing the story
After students fleshed out the basics of their story (and learned a great deal about compromise in the bargain), they got to use the characters to act out the story in the setting. The final step, which we haven't done yet, is to write it out.

I love this activity because it gets kids quickly to deep thinking about stories. How do characters and settings interact? How does the conflict relate to both? It gets them saying vocabulary words ("The protagonist should be...."  "Medusa is the villain!"..."Mrs. Kissner, I forget. What does the present mean again?") and working with each other.

Best of all, though, is how much they enjoy it! It makes a good fun activity to sprinkle throughout our stamina-building quiet reading and rigorous Common Core activities. :)

Summarizing A Story

Here is a Powerpoint that I wrote a few years ago to help students learn how to summarize a narrative. It introduces students to the bad strategies that they may have picked up, explains the characteristics of a good summary, and then has them choose the best summary to the story "The Very Hungry Caterpillar".

Why this really simple book? Not only is it widely available and easy to track down in just about any school, but it has lists to collapse and is a quick, engaging read.

Summarizing A Story

View more presentations from Emily Kissner.

As I prepare for state testing this week, this presentation will be a nice review. Then, students will practice summarizing with the story "Goose in the Blackberry Patch" from our state's released sampler items.

You can find Pennsylvania's testing samplers here. Many of the stories and nonfiction pieces are nicely written and can be useful in the classroom even beyond test prep. "Goose in the Blackberry Patch" can be found in the grade 4 2005-2006 reading sampler.

Layering inferences

I love surprise stories. I love it when an author strings me along to think that things are going to unfold in one way, only to have them unfold completely differently. For very young kids, Kathy Mallat’s Trouble on the Tracks is a good example of this kind of book. As an older reader, I loved The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner, because the first person narrator is hiding something the entire time.

But I need to be cautious in using too many surprise stories with my students, because these kinds of stories are often the exception instead of the rule. For every book that has a blinding surprise at the end, there are at least five others that unfold along more predictable lines. It’s far more likely that a reader will encounter a story that leads to a deepening and refining of predictions.

I wrote “The Magic School” story to try this out with students. (It showed up as a presentation at Slideshare, but it's really a Word document, formatted to copy double-sided) I wanted a story in which small clues lead to larger clues, a story that would be supportive to students as they make inferences. I embedded the questions to help readers pause and think at certain spots. It's bare of illustration because I wanted to give readers more of an experience in visualizing from scratch. It's set in a familiar location, with familiar items, so they should be able to create the pictures in their heads.

When I used it with a small group of students, “The Magic School” worked wonderfully. The students liked being able to write on the books, and the questions served their purpose. It was interesting to see which students could use the clues from the beginning of the story to help them figure out the events—for example, making the connection that the librarian had been the largest flower in the enchanted library. Some of the students picked up on it intuitively, while others needed coaching to recognize that, usually, the details in a story are there for a reason.

If you want to find out how your kids are making sense of text, try changing a few of the pronoun references in the story to see if kids pick up on it. This can work with any text and is a quick way to find out which of your students are not reading deeply. If they notice the pronoun mismatches, they have a picture in their minds which they are carrying forward through the text. If they breeze right through the mismatch, then you know you need to work with this child to read more deeply. (Thanks to Kameron, who noticed my pronoun mistake in the original story and brought it to the reading group's attention!)

The flower at the top is jewelweed, blooming abundantly now around wet areas. It has a surprise ending--the seed pods will pop when you touch them, leading to its other name, touch-me-not.