Have students identify the wants or needs of key characters and parts of the story where their various wants and needs conflict. Examine what those conflicts reveal about the characters.
On a second reading, build a major events (plot) map with students to record the most important happenings. Illustrate how a plot builds. Have students identify the turning point in the story. Lead them in a discussion of what came before and after (resources.corwin.com/literacycompanionk-2).
As you read a picture book a second time, invite students to hold up yellow sticky notes to signal major moments in the story. Pause to have them examine the illustration that depicts the scene and describe how the character is behaving, and why. Continue this activity until the story’s end. Help them notice whether or not characters typically act in certain ways.
Create a three-column chart with students that you can add to over the year, listing the main character’s name, a personality trait, and whether or not the character changes by the end of story. Doing so helps children see that in some stories the main character does change, while in others the author has the character stay the same on purpose (e.g., Curious George, Amelia Bedelia, Judy Moody, Clifford, Spinky in Spinky Sulks).
To help students describe how individuals, events, ideas, and pieces of information relate to one another:
Select a portion of a text and model how you absorb each sentence, noticing when two things connect in a particularly striking, important way. (For example, in a book about rain forest animals, you might note the connection between a parrot’s brightly colored feathers, camouflage, and the concept of predator/prey. In a biography of Jackie Robinson, Robinson and the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Branch Rickey, have a significant connection because Rickey dared to break the Major League Baseball color barrier by allowing Robinson to play.)
Help students identify language that lets them know two pieces of information, ideas, concepts, or events are being compared (but, however, in contrast, versus). Likewise, help them identify words that signal the information is organized in a sequence (first, next, and then).
To help students describe the connection between historical events, scientific ideas or concepts, or steps in technical procedures:
Help students determine why something happened as it did. This will help them begin to identify cause/effect relationships between concepts, people, and events.
Gather a few texts that offer different and clear examples of signal words. Read the texts and chart the signal words, posting them on the wall for student reference. For example, some authors use timelines, dates, numbered steps, and words like first, second, next, last, most important, and years ago.
To help your English language learners, try this:
Guide a small group of students through a basic story in which the story elements are obvious and unambiguous. If students don’t each have their own copy of the story, use an enlarged text. Wordless books offer students the opportunity to focus on the story elements shown in the illustrations.
Provide students with a story structure graphic organizer and have them discuss the story elements and fill them in as you or they read. For nonfiction text, use a graphic organizer that matches the text structure and fill in the organizer as you read or discuss the text.
Make certain students understand the academic vocabulary you’re using, such as main character, problem, and resolution, and for nonfiction text, main idea and details.
Developmental Debrief:
Nascent readers typically focus more on the plot than on the characters. The teacher, therefore, is instrumental in helping students make the move from focusing on the plot to attending to how and why the characters behave as they do. Select read-aloud and shared-reading texts with multidimensional characters and guide students to recognize how the characters’ personality traits and ways of thinking or acting ultimately affect how the story turns out.
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Grades K–2 Common Core Reading Standard 3: Academic Vocabulary: Key Words and Phrases
Analyze: This means to look closely at something for the key parts and how they work together.
Characters: Characters can be simple (flat, static) or complex (round, dynamic); only characters that change, that have rich inner lives and interact with people and their environments, can be considered “complex.”
Cause/effect relationship: This is the relationship between the reason (or “why”) something happens and the consequences of that action. The cause is why something happens. The effect is what happens as a result of the cause.
Compare/contrast: This requires students to identify and analyze what is similar (compare) and what is different (contrast) about two things.
Connections: This refers to how one idea, event, piece of information, or character interacts with or relates to another idea, event, piece of information, or character. When connecting one idea to another idea or one event to another event, students often have to consider cause and effect, or why things turned out as they did. When connecting characters, they might need to consider how the changes in characters from the beginning of a story to the end relate to how the main character interacts with or relates to other characters or events in the story.
Develop and interact: As stories unfold, events and characters change; these changes are the consequences of interactions that take place between people, events, and ideas within a story or an actual social event. In addition, as individuals, events, and ideas change or develop, they often grow more complex or evolve into something altogether different.
Key details: In the context of literature, key details relate to story grammar elements—that is, character, setting, problem, major events, and resolution—and how they interact. In the context of informational text, key details refer to the facts and ideas the author selects to support the text’s main idea.
Major events: These are the most important events in a story, typically related to how the main character resolves a problem or handles a challenge.
Sequence of events: This is the order in which the events in a story or text occur, or the order in which specific tasks are performed.
Setting: This is the place and time in which a story, novel, or drama takes place. To determine the setting, students describe where it takes place (there may be more than one setting in a text) and when it takes place, which may refer to a specific time period or can be the past, present, or future.
Steps in technical procedures: Whether in social studies or science, the idea here is that in any series of steps or stages, some steps or stages are more crucial than others. Students must be able to discern this so they can understand why the steps or stages are so important and how they affect other people or events.
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