All About the Story

Building academic language

Word

• Display the visual vocabulary cards and provide student-friendly definitions for each of the words.
• Explain that just like the students pictures, each character in a story has a different perspective and that sometimes a story is told by one or more than one character.
• Tell students that today you will be reading aloud a story and listening for the perspective of the characters. You will also be retelling what happened in the story by acting it out.

Sentence

• Read aloud the book Midnight at the Zoo by Faye Hanson.
• Pause as you read to ask questions about what is happening in the book. Provide students with questions using related sentence frames to guide them through the plot in the book.
• Record student thinking on the classroom story map.
• Model recording student thinking using complete sentences, emphasizing the importance of including a capital and a period.

Discourse

• Model how to retell a story by acting out the beginning, middle, and ending.
• Put students into small groups of three and have them practice retelling the story by acting it out (one student acts out the beginning, one acts out the middle, and one acts out the ending).
• Encourage students to use the language, "In the beginning...in the middle...in the end..." as they act out their part of the story.