Our classroom has had quite a transformation over the past few weeks! While learning to write fictional narratives, our class has gone from summarizing events to being storytellers that use the same strategies as the published authors we love.
We have been learning about how most stories follow a story arch where towards the beginning of the story, characters face a problem that gets worse as the story progresses. Something in the story then occurs to cause the character to learn and change which allows them to solve the problem. The story ends with the problem getting better. Students story arched their own story ideas and began developing characters. We used our knowledge of character traits from our learning during Reader's Workshop to help us come up with realistic characters that have character flaws that add to the problem in the story.
One major focus of this unit has been a push from summarizing the events to making the events come alive through the use of action, dialogue, thinking and feeling. The picture below shows an example of The Three Billy Goats Gruff story summarized and then rewritten using the strategies mentioned above. We are learning to show the major events in the story rather than tell about them. Instead of saying, "the character was angry," students are putting themselves into the shoes of the character and are imagining what they would say, or do to show they were angry.
How Can You Help?
Writing in this way is still a relatively new concept to students so it is still tricky for some. You can help by pointing out when an author is using a lot of action, dialogue, thinking or feeling as you are reading together. Then ask your child how they could do something like it in their own story. Another way you can help is by playing a "storytelling game" in which you story tell an event from your day with action, dialogue, thinking and feeling and then have your child do the same. The more experience they have with this the better they are going to get!
Happy Storytelling!
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