Teaching Story Elements with Kevin Henkes Books

I just love Kevin Henkes' books. Every. Single. One of them. Not only are they creative stories, but they also have great life lessons to teach my students as well. Another reason I love his books is they have the most incredible characters; and they really lend themselves as great resources to use while teaching story elements and reading comprehension!

A class favorite that I always read every year is Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse. It's a great story, especially for the beginning of the year when you are introducing rules and procedures in the classroom!

In this book, Lilly brings all sorts of fun little trinkets to school and she is excited to share them with the class - a little TOO excited. She interrupts the teacher multiple times until, finally, the teacher takes her prized possessions away and she gets just a little upset. Various shenanigans occur throughout the story until she finally realizes that she shouldn't have acted the way she did. The book is great for a character study on the main character, Lilly, because she changes so often throughout the story and goes through a myriad of emotions. So I used the book for a little study on identifying character traits and describing how the main character changed throughout the story from beginning to end. We created a little anchor chart together and these are all of the words my students came up with to describe Lilly - they did a great job!

You can see from the web words how much the main character changed throughout the story and it was a great discussion to have with my kids to help them understand how to describe her!

The next day, we read the story again and my focus was to have them work on retelling the story by sequencing events. We used the picture retelling cards from the wonderful Guiding Readers K-1 pack by Deanna Jump and Deedee Wills. I put my students into small groups and gave them each a set of retelling cards. They then had to work together with their groups to try and retell the story by putting their pictures in order from beginning to end. It was awesome for me to walk around and hear them all collaborating together on why a certain picture should be moved; or put in this spot; and why, etc. It really helped them think more deeply about the events of the book.

After they put their pictures in order, we came back together as a class and I put the pictures in the correct order so they could check their work. They were SO excited when they got a picture in the correct sequence! Having my students talk with each other and use visuals to retell the story really helped them have a more in depth understanding of what happened in the book, rather than just hearing me stand up there and talk about it as they listened.

Once we finished our group work, my students then got a smaller version of the retell pictures and had to sequence the pictures again on their own. This was a great check for understanding for me on who really understood the sequence of events and what little friends still needed a bit of support on it!

(The small retell pictures are also from the ladies' Guiding Readers pack)!

On the third day, we read the story again, this time by listening to this version on Youtube, just to change it up a little bit so that it didn't get too stale for them:

I liked this version because it is read by a teacher and she stops and asks little comprehension questions here and there! After hearing the story, we focused on story elements: characters, setting, plot, problem, and solution. Mind you, even though our activity on the third day focused on story elements, we had been talking about story elements and learning about them long before this day, so they had a little background knowledge. To make it fun, we made a little book in the shape of a purse: Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse Story Elements! The kids did SUCH an awesome job writing and illustrating these details about the story. They absolutely loved that they had their own little plastic purse at the end, too! It was the perfect culminating activity for this story.

Another Kevin Henkes book that I love reading to my students is Kitten's First Full Moon. It's a simple book, but a great beginning book for teaching students how to retell and summarize a story.

First, I read the story aloud and, as we go through the story, I'll stop periodically and ask my students what the kitten did using order words such as first, next, then, after that... this helps them recall the order that events occurred in the story because they've got that vocabulary to guide them. After discussing the main events in the story, I modeled how to summarize the story in their own words. I told my kids excitedly that they would get to tell the story with the words that THEY wanted, as if they were going to be the author. They were so into it! I whipped up this little writing craftivity to put with their summaries and they turned out so great! In the story, the kitten sees the moon and is attempting to get to it because he thinks it is a bowl of milk. In the craftivity, he is peeking over the edge to try and get to the moon, which is popping off the page 3D style!

Here are some student samples of the Kitten's First Full Moon story summary craftivity:

If you're interested in adding this story summary/reading comprehension craftivity to your Kevin Henkes' study, you can grab it from my TPT store by clicking the picture below! There are multiple differentiated writing template options available in the pack to help you best fit the needs of your students!

I could go on and on about all of his books... they are all wonderful options for teaching story elements and reading comprehension skills! What are some of your favorite Kevin Henkes books?

Revisiting Kindergarten Journeys with TONS of freebies!

Excuse me while I dust the cobwebs off of my little corner of the internet... I haven't updated my poor, neglected blog in so long! I can't remember a year where I've been busier, so my blog kept moving further down the "to-do" list!

I've had a few readers e-mail me recently asking if I had any new resources to go with the Kindergarten HM Journeys curriculum, and the answer is YES! There are also a few freebies to download, so keep reading all the way till the end!

The first activity comes from Unit 1, Lesson 2 - and I've actually blogged about this before, when I first got the reading series a year ago. However, I never shared the freebie... better late than never! We read the story, How Do Dinosaurs Go to School? As we were reading, we of course were SHOCKED at how these dinosaurs were behaving at school... and promptly decided that we would never be like them! After reading the story, I displayed the four retelling pictures from the big flip book that comes with the series.

  

We talked about identifying main events in a story and talked about the four events in the pictures shown. Then the kids used the sentence strip to present the question we asked to help us retell - How do dinosaurs go to school? The students then had to identify and retell one of the main events from the story by drawing the setting and gluing the character into the picture to show one of the things it did at school.

The thing that I love about this activity is that it combines so many different skills: sentence structure, questioning, identifying main events, identifying main characters, setting, and using details.

Click on the picture below to download the FREEBIE of this activity!

The next activity comes from one of the stories in Unit 1, Lesson 4: The Elves and the Shoemaker. In this short fable, the Elves secretly help the kind Shoemaker at night by making shoes for him. Since it's a pretty short story, I wanted to come up with a quick, low-prep activity that the students could complete fairly independently. We use interactive notebooks in my classroom, so a quick journal prompt was the perfect way to go. I came up with these sentence strips for the kids to glue in their notebooks so that they could respond to the comprehension question by illustrating. I absolutely LOVE the way their illustrations turned out! How cute are the two shoemakers peeking around the corner in the first picture?! We used our "special crayon box" (AKA: a big kid skinny 24-pack) so they really took their time adding in tons of details.

Now we've reached Freebie Number 2! Click on the picture below to download!

The last story activity comes from a book in Unit 2: Amelia's Show and Tell Fiesta. My students had such a successful time with the previous journal prompt entry that I wanted to create one to use with this story as well. With this story, we focused on the main character and identifying character traits. However, I didn't feel like my group of kiddos had a very good grasp on what a character was, so the day before I read the book, I taught a little character mini-lesson using some of our very favorite book characters: David, Pigeon, Froggy, and Clifford!

I chose these four books because they are all characters that my students know and love and I knew it would be easy for them to identify things about each of them. I gave each student a whiteboard and we drew lines so that it would create four window notes on the board. I held up each book and asked them to identify each main character; then they drew a picture of each one in the four different windows.

              

After we identified all of the main characters, we went through each one one at a time and I asked the kids to describe things about each one. For example they said, "David is naughty" and "Clifford is big and red" and "Froggy likes to plop...plop...plop". Super easy, quick, and fun mini-lesson on characters!

The next day, we read Amelia's Show and Tell Fiesta. As we were reading, we discussed the main character (Amelia) and how she changed from the beginning of the story to the end. We used our interactive notebooks again to create two window notes for each question.

 

Freebie Number Three! Yes! Click below to download the Amelia's Show and Tell Fiesta prompts.

If you enjoy using these story prompt strips, check out my bundle for Units 1-6 of Kindergarten Journeys! There are multiple story response strips for every read aloud story in the reading series! Just click on the picture below to check it out!

Switching gears a bit here.. are you still with me? Good! When my kinder team and I looked over the new reading series last year, one of the things our eyes bugged out about was the sheer amount of sight words our students were required to learn. Of course, learning more sight words is never a bad thing, but later on in Journeys it introduces SIX sight words a week to our little guys! That's a lot to learn in a week and it's tough for all of them to stick without being able to dive in deep with word work activities for each one. I wanted to come up with an activity that would help them read, write, and build sentences using their sight words so that they could continue to see and review previously learned words and keep them fresh in their minds. Enter... my monthly sentence building packs! These packs include tons of themed sight word sentence building activities that fit exactly with the Journeys sight word list for each Unit! In each pack, you'll find build-a-sentence literacy stations, predictable sentence activities, differentiated printables, and read/write/build/draw printables for every sentence used in each set. Here are some of the activities in action... my students absolutely love them:

You can find every monthly pack in a discounted bundle in my TPT shop by clicking on the picture below:

You can also find each individual pack sold in my TPT store if you're not sure you want to commit to a whole bundle before trying it!

However.... I have more good news... a fourth freebie! And it's a Halloween-themed set of my sentence building activities to give you a sneak peek! You can download Spooky Sentence Building {Freebie} for FREE by clicking on the picture below. It has an entire set of mixed-up sentences + a printable!

If you find it works well for your students, you can grab the full October pack here, which is 68 pages chock full of sight word sentence fun:

Phew! If you are still reading all of this, go get yourself a cookie. Or a dessert. Or whatever floats your boat. A sticker, perhaps? You win.