Thinking About Connections with Reading

During Story Play time, I have focused my mini-lessons on what happens in the beginning, middle and end of a story, and then I have sent partners off to work on these parts of their own made-up stories. I am realizing, however, that we have not spent much time talking in depth about story parts in the context of books we are reading in class. Rather, the focus in reading has been more globally on retelling emergent stories using storybook language, character voices, reading the pictures, etc. I have seen select moments of connection, such as a discussion about retelling using character voices when someone referred to a Story Play lesson, saying, “It’s like ‘dialogue!’” But, overall, there has been little connection between Story Plays and the stories we are reading. And, similar to how I felt about the mechanics-focused writing instruction last year, it seems like reading instruction at this time of the year is beginning to be more heavily centered on using specific strategies to read leveled “Just right” books, so it is nice to have a space carved out separately for thinking about and exploring what makes a good story.

Perhaps I have been missing the mark in my instruction around Story Plays. This may simply be a matter of timing. I have made the mistake of taking the anchor chart I developed throughout the course of last year with my class and using it at the start of this year. In my excitement to jump right into Story Plays, I forgot that writing stories with a beginning, middle, and end was something last year’s students grew into over several rounds of story writing and weren't really ready for until the spring. This year’s students need time to develop and grow into this, too.

This has become more and more apparent as I look at the story endings my students have most recently been working on. Most of these beginning-of-the-year Kindergartners are not developmentally ready for separated story parts, for working on the beginning one day, then waiting three weeks to work on the middle and another three weeks to write the ending. Despite my re-reading and support around story parts during the mini-lesson, it is clearly difficult for most of these kids to hold onto a story they were thinking about weeks prior, besides the fact that we haven’t gone very deeply into what each part of a good story looks like anyway.

I am realizing that, at this point in the Story Play process, I am not actually interested in whether my students can sink into each part of the story and fully understand and use its elements. Later in the year, I will focus more on this and draw connections with the literature we are reading. For now, however, in this first round of Story Plays, I am more interested in gathering baseline information about what my students know already about stories. I do want to give them some basic guidelines, but mostly, I want to know what they are thinking about and doing instinctively in the story-creation process when they have time and space for their own natural process to emerge. What story knowledge are they coming with already? What do they think makes a good story? How do their knowledge and ideas about stories intersect, weave together, and grow as they work in partnerships and in a group creating stories together?

Closer analysis of just the first session or two of data is plenty for now. And from there I can hopefully draw some conclusions that will inform where I want to go with them in future Story Play lessons and in reading instruction, too. I love the idea of connecting concepts from Story plays back to Reader’s Workshop, where we can go more deeply into each part of a story. My big ‘Aha!’ moment here is that this is the opposite direction of how I had originally been thinking about these connections – Reading not only informs Story Plays, but Story Plays can also inform reading!

Story Plays as a bridge between Reading and Writing