Narrative Text

I thought this book was a good review of story elements and important parts of storybooks, but most of all I liked sending it home to inform parents about what we were learning.  I always encouraged parents to read to their children, after seeing this book they understood more clearly when I asked them to question their children about the characters, setting, problem and solution – or beginning, middle and end.  Comprehension is such an important part of reading, and encouraging parents to ask their children to retell stories they have heard is an important step.

I would be happy to share the masters for this book if someone can tell me how to post them.  In some cases I have the document on my computer, other pages have been cut and pasted but I could scan or photograph them, but I am not sure how you could print them.  Any help?

The words on this page say Every book has a title, it is the name of the book.  The title is usually the biggest word on the cover.

I gave each child an assembled book, then I photocopied and reduced the cover of a book to show the title.  One of the assessments I was required to do was Concepts about print – it included asking the children to point out the title of a book.  I realized I needed to make a point of interchangeably using “the name of the book,” and the title.  I also made a point of looking at the title on the cover of books with the children and talking about how those were usually the largest words.

One year our school had a guest author who taught my children a simple song to the tune of the Farmer in the Dell – I sang it often to differentiate author and illustrator, and included it in this book.

The author writes the words

The author writes the words

Hi Ho Library-O

The author writes the words.

And:

The illustrator draws

The illustrator draws

Hi Hi Library-O

The illustrator draws.

The words say “Characters are the people or animals who talk and do things in the story.”

I used this little symbol labeled characters (at the top of the page) whenever I wanted the children to think about the characters.  Sometimes as a retelling activity I would have the children draw pictures of the characters, setting, problem and solution – and having these little “icons” helped the children remember what the story elements are as well as where I wanted them to draw.

The icon I used for this was also this broken bat.

A small version of this bandaid was the icon for solution – we discussed how solution and resolution meant the same thing.

I found that helping the children see that you usually find out the characters and setting at the beginning of a story, then in the middle something usually goes wrong, and at the end the problem gets fixed; really helped them in retelling stories.

Please click on the link below to get a copy of the page headings and clipart I used for this book!

Text feature pgs.

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