Transferring

Transferring the skills that we are learning in our Author Study to our general reading is our goal. We want the children to understand that learning about story elements (characters, setting, problem and solution) in our Kevin Henkes books helps us understand any fictional story - that if we understand the structure of a narrative story that it will help us predict what will happen in any fictional story and understand comprehension at a deeper level. So that our children can practice using story elements across their reading, we had them use the same graphic organizer that they used for the Kevin Henkes' stories to organize "just right" stories from their reading bin. The children used their reading response notebooks to record the story elements of one of their own fictional books.On the first page the student drew a triangle and recorded the characters, setting and the problem in the story.On the next page he drew a large rectangle and drew the events. Some students wrote three events and others wrote four or six events, depending on the action in the story. On the last page the child drew a circle and inside that ending shape, wrote the solution to the problem in the story. In this way students are transferring the organization of the retelling of the Kevin Henkes' stories into their own reading lives.