Bulletin board of story elements

This lesson will introduce young children to the elements of stories starting with characters. Children will be involved with interactive writing as they respond to shared reading lessons. Students will illustrate a caption of a character to be displayed on a bulletin board.

A lesson plan for grades K–1 English Language Arts

Learn more

• Jan Brett's Website

Related pages

• Is Mr. Wolf really a bad guy?: This lesson is intended to show children the importance of evaluating information as they read. The author's point of view is limited in that it only truly shows one side of the story. There is always another perspective. How the author views a subject colors everything that he or she writes about.
• Getting in order: "Jack and the Beanstalk": The students will read "Jack and the Beanstalk" as a group and create flip books to illustrate and sequence the main events.
• Bubba: A Cinderella story: This lesson focuses on the whimsical interpretation of the Cinderella story. Students explore the story Bubba, the Cowboy Prince, through rich text and interpretations of the story.

Related topics

• Learn more about Jan Brett, The Mitten, characters, folktales, language arts, literature, pre-reading strategies, read-alouds, stories, and story sense.

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Learning outcomes

Students will understand that a character is a person or animal in the story and that characters have goals.

Teacher planning

Time required for lesson

4 hours

Materials/resources

• Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg
• Big books of familiar folk tales such as “The Three Bears”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, etc.
• The Mitten by Jan Brett, as well as other versions of the story.
• Sentence strips
• Markers

Technology resources

Computer connected to a printer with internet access for follow-up activities.

Activities

1. Have students note clues from the cover of the big book Each Peach Pear Plum that will give ideas about who the characters will be in this guessing game book. Introduce ‘character’ as a person or animal in the story. Once students have had a chance to note the clues on the cover, read the book, having the students play the I spy game as instructed. After reading, ask them to recall as many characters as they can.
2. The next day ask the students to use the clues from the front to name characters that appear in the book. As students recall characters, have them write with a marker on the sentence strip the sounds they hear in the character’s name. The teacher inserts, as appropriate, any missing sounds, and reminds children when capital letters are appropriate. Save these strips. Reread the story and add any remaining characters’ names, writing interactively as described above.
3. Continue in the following days to read familiar folk tales adding these characters’ names to your collection of sentence strips. Each time reinforce that a character is a person or animal in the story.
4. Once you have collected quite a few character names, give each child a name to illustrate with markers. Then cut around the character’s shape and display it on the bulletin board along with the caption.

Assessment

Assessment will occur orally as you complete story maps and other comprehension tasks in response to shared reading lessons.

Supplemental information

• A great book about story elements to share with students as well as just for your own enjoyment is From Pictures To Words, A Book About Making a Book by Janet Stevens.
• Here is a picture of my classroom’s completed bulletin board.

Comments

In following lessons with The Mitten by Jan Brett, students wear masks, downloaded from Brett’s website, to reenact the story. This leads up to learning about characters’ goals. From there other versions of The Mitten can be used not only for comparison but also to see that authors use different characters which still have the same goals. Additional masks are available for reenacting other stories at the Brett website.

Children can reread a story in a choral style identifying with the character through a character necklace made with an index card and yarn.

I plan to follow the same procedures described above to teach the concepts of setting, time, and story problem, each time having the students write interactively and illustrate the concept for display on the bulletin board.