{"id":4190,"date":"2019-09-26T15:34:07","date_gmt":"2019-09-26T21:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mommyspeechtherapy.com\/?p=4190"},"modified":"2023-12-04T12:50:10","modified_gmt":"2023-12-04T19:50:10","slug":"how-to-teach-story-structure-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mommyspeechtherapy.com\/?p=4190","title":{"rendered":"How to Teach Story Structure"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m excited to share this post with you on how to teach Story Structure to children. While it was written from my perspective, it was a combined effort with my colleague and dear friend JaNeal Freeman. I have learned so much from her over the past few years about stories. She is a gifted writer with a brilliant mind. She is the author of all the stories in our iPad app, Little Stories<\/a> (Lite<\/a> and Pro<\/a>). I am so grateful she has shared her talents with all of us through her writing. Her stories are clever and creative and sure to delight both the young reader and their reading helpers. Collaborating with her over the past few years has been a real joy for me. I hope you enjoy this post and find it useful in helping you teach story structure to your little ones.<\/i>
\r\n\"\"<\/p>\r\n

\"\"\r\n\r\n

This past year I had the opportunity to volunteer in my daughter\u2019s 2nd grade classroom. Every week I listened to children read and then retell a story. There were several students who struggled to know how to organize a story in such a way that they could retell it and have it make sense. I created some worksheets with my colleague, JaNeal Freeman, that really helped these students retell stories with more confidence and accuracy. We\u2019d like to share those worksheets with those of you who are trying to teach story structure to your students or children.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

Stories are an important form of communication. A story can be poignant, like when we share a meaningful moment from life, or it can be more ordinary, like when we tell someone about a great movie. Either way, story sharing is a way we connect with one another. Story is also a tool to help us understand the events of our lives more coherently. Still, storytelling is a skill and even at its most basic levels, it can be a challenge for some children to learn. When we teach children how to tell stories, we teach them to become better communicators.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

In my experience, the best way to teach narrative to young children is to help them identify the beginning, middle, and end of a story. You might teach them to tell a story by using transition words ( e.g. first\u2026, then\u2026, and finally\u2026) to represent and organize the beginning, middle, and end. While this will result in a sparse retell, the goal is to work with narrative in manageable chunks. But these are not random chunks\u2014these are structures. All stories have a beginning, middle, and an end.<\/p>\r\n\r\n

For example, you can break the story of The Three Little Pigs<\/i> into three parts by saying,<\/p>\r\n\r\n