Fantastic Fables: 5 W's

Explicit Instruction/Teacher modeling

• After the brief discussion, display or draw the Star Graphic Organizer using a projector, interactive white board, or white board.
• Model finding the answers to the who and what questions using the fiction text. Provide evidence to your answers by revisiting the pages in which the answers are found.

• Make sure to write the page, paragraph, and line number next to each answer, and explain why evidence is so important when providing an answer.

• Pause the activity and explain to the students that the 5 W’s are supporting details that can help readers discover the main idea.

• Next, display the Main Idea Anchor Chart, and inform students that the main idea is a short sentence that describes what the story is mainly about.

Guided Practice

• Ask for three volunteers or choose three students who can help you complete the remaining questions on the Star Graphic Organizer.
• Encourage students to cite their evidence.

Independent working time

• Tell students that today they are going to work as a group of detectives to find the 5 W’s in the story Little Red Riding Hood.
• Review the vocabulary words and their definitions with the class at this time.
• Focus the attention back to the activity by explaining that instead of using a magnifying glass to look for clues within the text, they will be using glass pebbles instead.
• Break up your students into groups of five, and provide each group with five different colored highlighters or crayons.
• Tell students to read the story as a whole group. Once they finish, each member of the team is responsible for finding one of the 5 W’s.
• Assign colors to each W. For example, blue is who, green is why, etc.
• Have students color code the sentences in which the “who, what, when, where, and why” are found.