Common Core Reading: Teaching Story Elements

I am back with post #3 for the Reading Literature Standards Chapter of my book club! This post will discuss Key Ideas and Details Standard 3 (RL.3.3, RL.4.3, RL.5.3) which focuses on teaching story elements. The post about Standard 1 can be found here and Standard 2 can be found here. Make sure you head over to those to grab the free printables for those standards.

Below shows the progression of the standards from 3rd grade to 5th grade:

• 3rd graders have to describe the characters and explain how their actions affect the sequence of events.
• By 4th grade, the students have to describe characters, settings and events in depth.
• 5th graders have do all of this so they can compare and contrast the different story elements.

You can really see how  these standards build on each other. This is good but also a little scary when you have kids with those huge gaps. When this happens, you have to reteach the previous standards before moving on to grade level standards or teach both simultaneously.

Ideas for the Classroom

The section spent some time talking about character profiling and becoming an expert on the characters in the book. I loved this! Once a student becomes an expert, they can then effectively describe the character and compare and contrast the character with another character. This could extended to becoming a “Story Element Expert” where the students are experts in characters, settings, and certain events.

Here are some questions to guide a discussion:

• How does the character look? How does this affect his actions and how others perceive him?
• What does your character say? What information does this dialogue tell you?
• How does the setting contribute to the events? What if the setting were in another location or time?
• How do the events in the beginning compare to the events in the end?

Here are two free printables that will help your students become story element experts and allow them to practice, apply, and master the standards.