Telling a Story

This book is filled with material to help students learn about stories, listen to and retell stories and to make up stories on their own.

Telling a Story is designed to help students understand the structure of a story. Students see that story narratives have particular structural 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 need for comprehending and telling stories?

• Sequencing events...
• Understanding experiences from different points of view...
• Inferring - drawing conclusions within stories...

The second part of this book looks at the elements of a story and offers plenty of material for practice and learning.

• 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 conclusion through inference is once again addressed. Here students simply identify characters and settings using clues presented. The last page of this section is a "reverse inference" activity where the student is given a description of characters and settings then is asked to generate a simple narrative describing the characters and settings.
• Introducing story beginnings...Stories begin when events occur which upset the equilibrium (characters in time and place carrying out activities as expected) and evoke reactions from the characters. These two pages deal with events that might begin a story.
• Characters' feelings in response to initiating events...Students should be encouraged to associate a character's reaction with the initiating event of a story. It is this reaction - the character's 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...Part II 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...

• Story titles...
• Pictures for story building...