Telling a story is designed to help students understand the structure of a story. Students see that story narratives have particular sturctural characteristics. All stories include common elements that are arranged in a predictable sequence.
The first part of the book addresses the story as a whole. Stories are presented along with guides for retelling these stories. Components of each story are identified and broken into steps that follow typical story structure.
What skills are needed for comprehending and telling stories?
> Sequencing events
> Understanding experiences from different points of view
> Inferring - drawing conclusions within stories
The second part of the book looks at the elements of a story and offers plenty of material for practice and learning. Elements included are:
Describing characters - Hundreds of words are presented describing physical appearance, personality traits, and characters' feelings along with activities.
Describing the setting - Words denoting places and time are presented along with support activities.
Inference - Drawing conclusions through inference is once again addressed. Here students simply identify characters and setting using clues presented.
Introducing story beginnings - Stories begin when events occur which upset the equibrium (characters in time and place carrying out activities as expected) and evoke reactions from the characters.
Characters' feelings in response to initiating events - Students should be encouraged to associate a character's reaction with the iniating event of a story. It is this reaction (the characters feeling toward the event and consequences) that determines the direction of the story as the character attempts to move toward resolution.
Characters' attempts or desires to resolve conflict - This part addresses the attempts, plans, or desires to return to a state of equilibrium resolving the problem. At this point students should have a grasp of how characters, settings, initiating events, feelings and attempts at resolution are related. From here, the story moves toward an end, leaving the characters with a lesson learned.
Finally, students are challenged to write their own stories. They'll find plenty of ideas and materials in the last part of this book for:
> Story starting ideas
> Outlines for writing stories
> Story-making events
> Story titles
> Pictures for story building
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Storybooks