How to Use Story Books to Teach Reading
Story books are powerful tools that offer more than just an enjoyable reading experience. Through the use of story books, teachers can effectively instruct students on basic literary elements. A well-grounded understanding of these literary elements will help students develop reading skills that they can use to transition into higher-level reading as they continue through school.
Things You'll Need
- Picture books
- Paper
- Pencil
- Markers
- Stapler (optional)
- Coil binding (optional)
Instructions
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Practice basic reading conventions. Use picture books to show students how to engage in reading. Hold the story book up so that is facing your students as you read; this will allow them to see the process of reading in action. To do this, teachers can hold the story book up to students so that they can see the process of reading in action. Demonstrate how to start reading a book by flipping past the title page to the text, showing your students how to find the text of a story. Move your fingers over the text as you read, that we read from left to right, and turn to the next page when all of the words on that page have been read. As students see the teacher actively reading, they will start to understand the basic mechanics of the reading process.
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Explore characters. Practice picking characters out of a story book. Explain to students that the people (or whatever form the characters take, like animals or objects) in books are called characters. As you are reading the book, list the characters on the board. Allow students to point to the characters in the pictures throughout the book or engage with the text by drawing pictures of the characters as they are described in the book.
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Identify plot. Help students recognize the plot of a book. Tell students that the events that happen in a book are called the plot. Read a short text to students and then ask them to draw out the events that happened. Ask each student to draw one picture of something that happened in the book. Once students are done, ask them to come up, one at a time, and explain what their picture is showing. After students explain their pictures, have the class put them in the order in which they occurred in the text you read.
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Identify the setting. Help students pick the setting out of a book by asking them to describe the time, place and environment in which the book took place. After you read a text with your students, discuss when and where the book took place. Ask your students to imagine how the story in the book would have been different if it had occurred in a very different time and place. For example, if a story set during a beach vacation had taken place in Alaska during Januray, what would have been different? Tell students that the time, place and environment in which a book is set all make up the setting.
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Transition into writing by having students compose their own picture books. After students have learned the basic principles of reading as well as the key literary elements, ask them to make their own picture books. Divide students into groups of four or five and ask each group to come up with a story. Depending upon your students' abilities, you can ask them to write out the story in short sentences. Or, if you can arrange it, you can partner them with children from a higher grade and have the elder child transcribe the story for their young partners. After the story has been written, ask the students to illustrate it by creating pictures to accompany the text. Combine the pages into a book using staples or a coil binding.
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