Reading: Interpreting Characters: The Heart of the Story
Bend I: Establishing a Reading Life
Bend I: Establishing a Reading Life
- Create a reading environment – procedures and routines
- Retell to cement comprehension and use partners and checklists to lift the level of envisionment
- Develop ideas and grow theories about characters using the story arc to notice important details about characters
- Notice author’s craft
- Find complications in characters
- Use debates to prompt rich conversations around books and ground evidence back in the text
- Study other elements of the text by looking at the whole story
- Connect thoughts to build interpretations
- Find meaning in recurring images, objects, and details
Writing: The Arc of the Story: Writing Realistic Fiction
Bend I: Creating and Developing Stories and Characters that Feel Real
Bend I: Creating and Developing Stories and Characters that Feel Real
- Live like writers, seeing ideas for fiction stories everywhere and collect those ideas
- Collect a few true small moment stories to help launch into fictionalizing these moments
- Story-tell ideas to a partner
- Choose an idea and develop their ideas, focusing on the main character – wants and needs, believable characteristics
- Use a story arc to plan, draft, and revise
- Focus on storytelling rather than summarizing
- Prepare pieces for audiences through more focused drafting, deep revision work, and editing
- Teach writers to consider the importance of setting in a story
- Rethink the evolution of their stories – the solutions are those we make; not magic