Thank you for your willingness to share your ideas. A number of teacher that I work with love your ideas and are putting them to use.
We have one to share with you. In this months post you talked about Story Mountain as a way to teach plot. In addition we use a Plot Graph help kids see the rising and falling action. This is also a great way practice summarizing what's happened in a chapter.
First, we set up a basic graph with an x axis labeled chapters and the y axis labeled excitement. Students, usually in pairs, take one of the chapters that we've read so far, summarized the main events, and write them on a sentence strip. This sentence strip is taped to the x axis. Then the class does a quick vote (1-10) on the level of excitement in the chapter. I usually quickly average this for them. We mark this with a point on the graph and as we add chapters we connect the points to make a line graph.
We've used this for Frindle and Snow Treasure and compared the different plot lines, but have been able to label the background, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution on both. This has also lead to a great discussion on how some authors lead with the excitement to hook you and then go back to explain how it's all come to be.
I'm trying to attach a picture through google docs. It's so much easier to see.
Hi Beth,
Thank you for your willingness to share your ideas. A number of teacher that I work with love your ideas and are putting them to use.
We have one to share with you. In this months post you talked about Story Mountain as a way to teach plot. In addition we use a Plot Graph help kids see the rising and falling action. This is also a great way practice summarizing what's happened in a chapter.
First, we set up a basic graph with an x axis labeled chapters and the y axis labeled excitement. Students, usually in pairs, take one of the chapters that we've read so far, summarized the main events, and write them on a sentence strip. This sentence strip is taped to the x axis. Then the class does a quick vote (1-10) on the level of excitement in the chapter. I usually quickly average this for them. We mark this with a point on the graph and as we add chapters we connect the points to make a line graph.
We've used this for Frindle and Snow Treasure and compared the different plot lines, but have been able to label the background, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution on both. This has also lead to a great discussion on how some authors lead with the excitement to hook you and then go back to explain how it's all come to be.
I'm trying to attach a picture through google docs. It's so much easier to see.
Thanks again for sharing. Hope you enjoy ours!
Angie