Story Frames for Teaching Literacy

Enhancing Student Learning Through the Power of Storytelling

Carolee Dean

• Publisher: Brookes Publishing
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781681254548
• eBook ISBN: 9781681254555
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Literacy
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Mastering the art of storytelling isn't just a goal for professional writers. Analyzing and creating stories can boost critical literacy skills for all learners—and this comprehensive resource will show teachers and SLPs how.

Aligned with the science of reading, this innovative guidebook reveals how to unlock literacy and learning skills by captivating K–12 students with the power of stories: how they're structured, how they reflect and change lives, and how students can create their own original narratives. Using dozens of diverse fiction and nonfiction books as vivid examples, you'll discover how to teach 12 key story elements ( Story Frames ) in dynamic, fun, and highly visual ways, including Quick Draws, storyboards, and icons that make narrative structure easy to grasp. Then you'll get in-depth guidance on how to use knowledge of story structure to build core literacy skills—from oral language to reading comprehension—and empower students to write their own personal stories in a variety of genres.

Enhanced with more than 35 adaptable lesson plans and a complete package of online support materials, Story Frames is an accessible pathway to structured literacy that any educator can start using right away. You'll use it year after year to strengthen your students' skills and instill a lifelong love of reading and writing in every learner.

STORY FRAMES WILL HELP YOU

• Get started with structured literacy in a fun and engaging way
• Build core literacy skills, including phonological awareness, reading comprehension, oral language, vocabulary, grammar, syntax, narrative development, and expository writing
• Strengthen your existing curriculum with flexible lesson plans and activities aligned with the science of reading
• Effectively teach narrative structure to both struggling and advanced learners
• Teach students in any setting, with practical tips for teletherapy and virtual instruction
• Boost executive function skills by making the writing process comprehensible, meaningful, and manageable
• Empower students with and without disabilities by giving them the tools to tell their own stories

ONLINE MATERIALS: Implement Story Frames effectively with a full package of downloadable materials, including sample storyboards and templates, 40+ handouts and worksheets, game cards, slide decks to use in instruction, 30+ sample story analyses of books for children and young adults, and brief literature guides for applying Story Frames to picture books and to chapter books and novels.

II

Using Story Frames to Build Literacy Skills

Section II focuses on using Story Frames strategies to build key literacy skills. Chapter 4 provides an in-depth look at the development of oral language, which is the foundation for written language. It discusses in detail how children develop oral narrative complexity. This chapter summarizes the narrative writing expectations outlined in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and the downloadable resources include a more detailed overview of the CCSS expectations across Grades 1–8. With these developmental expectations clearly in mind, Chapter 5 focuses on improving oral language and strategies for using oral retells to build the foundational skills of vocabulary understanding and use, sequencing, grammar usage and sentence construction, and story retelling. Chapter 6 explores how to make the transition from oral to written language, beginning with story retells and progressing to the creation of original stories. Chapter 7 discusses strategies for teaching expository writing and uses the Story Frames approach to analyzing narrative nonfiction as a means of helping students transition from creating and summarizing stories to creating and summarizing informational texts. Chapter 8 looks at how to improve reading and listening comprehension through visual strategies and questioning. Chapter 9, written by William Van Cleave, provides additional strategies for developing syntax and grammar. Chapter 10 tackles rhyme, alliteration, and phonological development, and how to express story knowledge through poetry. Chapter 11, written by Paula Moraine, focuses on executive function skills.

4

Understanding Narrative Development

This chapter will discuss how children develop a sense of narrative from earliest childhood through late elementary school and beyond. Young children’s earliest oral attempts at narrative lack structure and unity; they feel disconnected and formless. Over time, however, their oral narratives and eventual written narratives become increasingly sophisticated and include recognizable grammar elements, as discussed in Section I.

Story elements are only one aspect of narrative, however. Eisenberg et al. (2008) examine narrative in terms of both microstructure—word usage and grammatical structures, and macrostructure—story elements and their organization. When we read, listen to, tell, or write a story, we are working with both microstructure and macrostructure. We are dealing with language at the word and sentence level in addition to thinking about story elements and structure. To understand narrative development, it is therefore necessary to understand language development. This chapter will begin with an overview of typical oral language development and how this lays the foundation for oral and written narratives. The chapter then describes in detail the progression of narrative development in children from preschool through late elementary school and beyond. Additional developmental and cultural considerations are discussed, along with connections to grade-level expectations for written narrative in Grades 1–8.

DOWNLOADABLE RESOURCES

Keep this resource on hand for a quick summary of the Common Core State Standards for children’s narrative development: Common Core State Standards expectations for narrative writing, Grades 1–8.

GENERAL ORAL LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Story Frames is a resource specifically for Grades 1–8; however, our discussion of oral language development will begin at a much earlier age because many children with language delays exhibit the skill level of a much younger child. Understanding the developmental progression is essential for setting realistic goals. With that said, Story Frames has been used successfully with 4-year-olds in developmental preschool programs to work on sequencing and story retelling, with line drawings provided by the instructor for each element of the story.

Use of Phrases, Sentences, and Morphemes

In the article “Syntax Development in the School Age Years: Implications for Assessment and Intervention” Nelson (2013) discusses early oral language development and the transition from two-word phrases and sentences at age 2 to three-word utterances at age 3. She notes that even at this early stage, in these very short utterances, a variety of sentence structures are observable. She describes how young children typically follow Brown’s (1973) pattern of acquisition of morphemes, which are used to expand both noun and verb phrases; however, Nelson states that language development beyond the age of 4 is not nearly as linear or predictable as it is in the early preschool years. Sentences become longer and more complex, but they do so in a variety of different ways.

Brown (1973) lists the order in which most children acquire morphemes in spoken language, starting with -ing endings (“Mommy sleeping”) at 19–28 months up to contractible auxiliary verbs (“Mommy is sleeping,” “Mommy’s sleeping”) at 30–50 months. He judges these ages to be the point when a child would be expected to use a particular form correctly 90% of the time. Between the ages of 19 and 50 months, other grammatical morphemes observed include the following: in, on, -s, irregular past tense verbs, regular past tense -ed, and articles (a, the). See his work for a complete list of grammatical morphemes and expected age ranges.

Scott and Balthazar (2013) look at typical sentence development and how to use that continuum as a barometer for identifying children who may be at risk for delays. They observe that by kindergarten children should be using many complex sentences in their speech with very few verb tense errors. They report that until about age 10, the number of words in a sentence corresponds more or less to a child’s age. For instance, a 2-year-old would be expected to use two-word utterances (“want cookie”), while a 3-year-old would use an average of three words per utterance (“I want cookie”). A 4-year-old would use an average of four words per utterance, and so forth, up to 10 words per sentence for a 10-year-old.

Language development undergoes a dramatic change between ages 3 and 5 and, not surprisingly, so does narrative development. According to Friend and Bates (2014), this includes improvement in executive attention and behavioral inhibition around age 4 as well as a significant increase in the use of verbs and conjunctions around ages 3–5. Children as young as 3 may use past tense in everyday speech, but they do not use it often when telling a story. By age 5, they show significant improvement in their ability to use verb tense markers, which help them describe the action and organize the events of a narrative.

Use of “Literate” Oral Language

Eisenberg et al. (2008) explore the elaboration of noun phrases and observe what they call a “literate language style” that appears during the school years in specific types of discourse such as narratives. This literate style includes more complex sentence structures and more specific word usage, and it helps to form a bridge between less formal spoken language and the type of language encountered in reading and writing. Although they point out the value of using narratives to identify students at risk for academic challenges, they also state that the microstructure (word usage and grammatical structures) of a student’s oral story is a more accurate pred...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Downloads
• About the Author
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Story Frames Analyses of Picture Books
• Story Frames Analyses of Chapter Books and Novels
• Section I: Your Story Frames Toolbox
• Section II: Using Story Frames to Build Literacy Skills
• Section III: Shaping Writers, Shaping Lives: The Power of Personal Narrative
• References
• Index
• Back Cover