Teaching early years students is a challenging yet fulfilling feat.
Curriculum
Story Sequence
Teaching early years students is a challenging yet fulfilling feat.
You start with a blank canvas, and you get to help define their first steps into education. As such, it’s vital to teach them fundamental skills that will serve them in their education moving forward and in life in general. Story sequencing is one such skill that all young children need to be taught at school – and happily, we teachers are the ones that get to do it!
If you’re gearing up for your first-ever story sequencing lesson unit or want to add a few more ideas to your repertoire, read on.
Education resources
All about story sequencing
Story sequencing is a crucial skill for young learners to develop to understand and tell stories. It helps them become better readers, writers, and communicators.
Story sequencing requires students to identify the main events of a story, put them in order, and create meaning out of them. That means being able to define stories as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. By teaching children how to sequence stories, they can learn about cause-and-effect relationships and use their critical thinking skills more effectively. This is the foundation for all learning in the future, from science class to art lessons. Teaching story sequencing should be done engagingly, allowing children to have fun while learning essential lessons from the story. Strategies such as visuals and technology integration can help make the process more enjoyable for young learners.
Additionally, teachers need to differentiate their lessons based on individual student needs so that all students feel included in the lesson regardless of their reading level. And as this is such a foundational skill, no child must be left behind.
Types of story sequencing teaching
Types of story sequencing teaching are as follows:
Narrative structure
One type of story sequencing teaching is the development of the narrative structure. This involves helping students identify the basic elements of a story, such as characters, setting, problem, and resolution. Students should be taught to analyze each element to create a cohesive plot line that will allow them to understand better and remember a story’s details. This includes identifying where a story starts, where it progresses, and where it ends.
Revising story sequences
The next type of story sequencing teaching is revising story sequences. This allows students to practice putting stories into their own words by rearranging events and adding or removing details for clarity. By doing this, they can understand how different interpretations can change the overall meaning of a story.
Story mapping
Finally, teachers can use story maps when teaching children about sequences in stories. Story maps help students visualize how all the pieces fit together within a given narrative arc by showing relationships between characters and settings while emphasizing essential plot points. These diagrams provide students with concrete information that helps them strengthen their comprehension skills while having fun with storytelling activities.
Integrating technology into the story sequencing unit
Integrating technology into teaching story sequencing can be a great way to engage young learners. For example, various reading comprehension apps are available that focus on helping students identify and understand the main events of stories. These apps contain interactive activities such as puzzles and matching games which help break down complex storylines, making them easier for children to comprehend.
Digital storytelling
Digital storytelling is a highly successful way teachers can use technology to teach story sequences. This involves using multimedia tools such as photos, videos, music, or sound effects to create an engaging narrative experience for students. By allowing children to explore visual elements while listening to audio clips or narrations, they become more invested in their learning process and better understand how all the pieces fit together within a given story arc.
This is especially helpful for children who struggle to grasp the concept of story sequencing and need more support before moving on to writing.
Digital story sequencing apps
Teachers can use digital story sequencing apps, which allow students to assemble stories by dragging and dropping different parts together to construct their narratives.
Through this activity, they learn how important it is for each event included within a storyline to flow logically from one point to the next to make sense overall. In addition, these apps and programs provide immediate feedback, so your students will know if their sequences are correct or incorrect – encouraging them toward success!
The importance of differentiating story sequencing lessons
Differentiating story sequencing lessons is essential to ensure all students have a successful learning experience. As a core skill, you must ensure your students fully understand the basics while pushing more advanced learners to the best of their abilities.
Here are some ideas to differentiate your story sequencing lessons:
Working in small groups
In a class of 30 students, it’s difficult to work with every child individually as much as you would like to. Setting small group tasks, it can help you give more personalized help to your students. Small groups and partner work can also help you provide individualized instruction and allows you to assess each student’s understanding of the material.
Ensure you’re utilizing your teacher aide (if you have one) to the best of your ability to give as much personalized help as possible.
Visual storyboarding
Visual storyboards are another great tool for differentiating instruction. They give students a visual representation of the main points of a given narrative arc, helping them understand how all the pieces fit together within their own stories.
With a visual storyboard, you can instruct students to work at the best level for them. For students needing additional help, you can ask them to fill in a visual storyboard showing the story’s beginning, middle, and end and add prompts to help. For children that need an advanced activity, get them to use a visual storyboard to represent a more complex sequencing structure: first, next, then, last.
Individualized technology
Technology integration is also an effective way to differentiate story sequencing lessons. It provides an engaging environment where students can interact with digital tools while receiving personalized instruction from their teacher. Most digital programs and apps have multiple levels available. And though they are often classed by age or grade, we know this isn’t always representative.
Study the app/program before the lesson and gauge more or less which skills each level covers and use that information as a basis to prescribe each student to start at a certain level. The beauty of these apps and programs is that if your student is struggling, they can go back to a level, and if they find it too easy, they can progress in the levels.
These activities will make learning more enjoyable and deepen student engagement and understanding of story sequences.
Using visual prompts
Finally, visual prompts play an essential role in helping young learners create meaning out of stories by providing visual cues which remind them about key plot points and build connections between characters, settings, and events within a storyline.
Activities like drawing comic strips can provide additional support when teaching children about the sequence in stories – allowing those who may struggle with reading comprehension levels to access the content at their own pace without feeling overwhelmed or frustrated by slower progress rates than their peers.
Provide sentence beginnings as prompts for students to create sentences to describe the pictures. You can group them by difficulty. For example, you may encourage one student to use the prompts ‘first, then, finally’, while you may instruct another student to use the prompts ‘In the beginning, then one day, all of a sudden, at last’.
Recommended storybooks for story sequencing
The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
The Very Hungry Caterpillar is an excellent book for teaching young learners how to sequence stories properly. In this story, readers follow the story of a caterpillar that eats and eats but nothing is satisfying enough! With its engaging illustrations and vivid descriptions of every meal the caterpillar eats, this book encourages children to think critically about how different pieces come together over time to create an interesting storyline worth telling.
The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson
The Gruffalo is a great story to teach children about story sequencing. It follows the journey of Mouse as he navigates his way through the dangerous forest, where all the animals are bigger than him and want to eat him, and he manages to convince them he’s too scary to eat!
Students can understand how events unfold through this narrative to tell a compelling story. They will also be able to identify cause-and-effect relationships between characters, settings, and plot points while learning valuable lessons about resilience in times of adversity.
The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt
The Day the Crayons Quit provides students insight into some common challenges faced during childhood, such as dealing with boredom or feeling misunderstood – all within a fun narrative arc involving crayons who decide they’ve had enough!
Students can learn important lessons about perspective while being introduced to subtle themes regarding perseverance throughout this humorous yet poignant picture book. As each new page reveals more details concerning the characters’ plight, readers become further invested in discovering what happens next. Perfect for understanding the concept of first, then, next, and, and then, etc.!
It’s also a great story that can be used in social studies classes, looking at different emotions and how they make us feel (just as the crayons do in the story).
Story sequencing is the vital first step to creating meaningful communicators
Teaching children about story sequencing is vital to help them understand how different pieces come together within a narrative arc.
Through activities such as revising story sequences, incorporating technology, and using visual tools like story maps, teachers can provide students with concrete information that helps strengthen their comprehension skills while also having fun with storytelling activities.
So start planning fun story sequencing lessons and turn your students into the world’s future storytellers!
