Story Charting with Venn Diagrams

Visual tools, like Venn diagrams, often appear in elementary math classes.  But they can be invaluable tools for young readers and writers, too, by making sense of big clouds of words and showing where they overlap and where they diverge.  Here is how second grade teachers use them to build their students' abilities to organize, categorize, and evaluate stories.
 

What You Need:

 Paper

Two stories

Blank Venn Diagram

Click here for a printable Venn Diagram

What You Do:

Ask your child to read one story at a time.  Once she's read both stories, ask her to consider one element of the story at a time, and organize the information in the Venn diagram.  The overlapping space is for the similarities between texts, and the individual circles that don’t overlap are for the contrasts or differences between stories.  Stuck on what parts of the story to compare and contrast? Here's a list of ideas:

• Characters- Who are they? What do you know about them? What is their age, gender, mood or other character traits? What is standing in their way?
   
• Setting- When does the story take place? Where does it take place?
   
• Atmosphere- What is the mood of the story (sad, slow, dark,  happy, exciting)?
   
• Genre- Is it an adventure story, a science fiction story, or a biography?
   
• Plot- What are the events that happen? How did they start? What was the outcome? Were the characters happy with the outcome?
   
• Lesson/Main idea- What is the moral of the story? What is the author trying to tell us?

Once your child maps out this information visually, it will be much easier for him to see the common details between both stories, and the differences. And that, in a nutshell, is comparative literature!