Picture It!
S.T.O.R.Y. ACRONYM The "Picture It!" reading comprehension strategy can be applied to both primary and secondary readers. It revolves around the idea that "two major components of comprehension are visualization and knowledge of story elements." To begin, students are introduced to the mnemonic device, S.T.O.R.Y. Each letter represents one of the five story elements: setting, talking characters, oops! a problem, attempts to resolve, yes, the problem is solved, respectively. The teacher illustrates each of the elements on the acronym itself: S is picture framed, T is a stick figure, O is a frowning face, R has a light bulb over it, and Y is a stick figure with its arms raised in triumph. After reading, students then brainstorm the pictures they would use to represent each letter (each story element) in S.T.O.R.Y. Lastly, students synthesize their individual pictures into one complete, all-encompassing, interactive picture. This allows them, upon completion, to see how all the story's elements work together to compose the basic plot. Students can also include vocabulary on their illustrations if they tie it to one of the five elements. That way the text's difficult terminology will be linked in memory with an image and a specific part of the plot. Naughton, V. M. (2008). Picture it! The Reading Teacher, 62(1), 65-68.
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MINI-LESSON
The use of two works of short fiction - one to model and one for active engagement - will allow our peers to see how the Picture It! S.T.O.R.Y. strategy can be implemented across content areas, like in English and social studies as demonstrated here. It will also show it can fit into different instructional approaches, like the twin texting and picture book pre-reading used here. Although the fiction choices were limited because text brevity was key in this mini-lesson (S.T.O.R.Y requires students to synthesize the entire text, so using a beginning, middle, or end excerpt from a longer work is not ideal), the two texts show two different instructional approaches for two content areas in which the S.T.O.R.Y. strategy could be implemented.
Connection
Mnemonic devices are everywhere in secondary education. In geography, HOMES (Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior) for remembering the five Great Lakes. In English, FANBOYS (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So) for remembering compound sentence coordinating conjunctions. In biology, Dear Philip Come Over For Good Spaghetti for the taxonomic classification system (Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species). In math, there is SOH CAH TOA for calculating the angle of a triangle (Sine = opposite/hypotenuse; Therefore; Cosine = adjacent/hypotenuse; Tangent = opposite/adjacent). introducing students to a mnemonic device that pertains to remembering story elements in fiction will be familiar for students (and therefore more palatable) and will fit in seamlessly with its cross-curricular prevalence. |
Teaching Point
In a mock English and social studies application, we will look at how to use the Picture It! S.T.O.R.Y. strategy to identify, extract, and comprehend the important information in fiction texts. As a mnemonic device for plot structure, S.T.O.R.Y. requires students to pinpoint each story element, reinterpret it visually, and then synthesize all the elements into one cohesive picture. Understanding how all the important ideas in a text add up and unfold to create a story helps readers see the important parts of a story as a whole, rather than in isolation.
Teach and Model
The teacher will explain and summarize the Picture It! S.T.O.R.Y. strategy, identifying what each letter stands for and its associated picture. Then the teacher will read aloud Paulo Coelho's short fable, "The Well of Madness" in order to model how to apply the Picture It! strategy to a piece of fiction that could be used in a social studies classroom. With a historical theme - the detriments of conformity to the dominant culture - the fable could be easily introduced to students as a precursor to learning about corrupt leaders or political leaders who just conformed to the prevailing ideas of their times. For example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not sign a request to accept a boatload of German immigrants into the U.S. during the Holocaust, perpetuating the global indifference to Hitler's atrocity. Also, the U.S. Supreme Court during the Jim Crow South upheld the constitutionality of "separate but equal" facilities with their Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Such a twin-texting setup would integrate both fiction and non-fiction into a history unit. Through a think-aloud, the teacher will discuss how she identified and then decided to illustrate each letter of S.T.O.R.Y., demonstrating how one should go back and reread in order to ground the illustrations in text details. Continuing the think-aloud, the teacher will explain how she synthesized all the individual drawings into one conglomerate, summarizing image. Ideally, the teacher would be drawing as she performed the think-aloud - modeling in real-time - but the illustrations will be premade for sake of time. Additionally, the teacher should note the quality of her illustrations. They are masterpieces or especially detailed, showing students that they are not expected to be artists and sketches are more than acceptable. Frye, E. M., Trathen, W., & Wilson, K. (2009). Pirates in historical fiction and non-fiction: A twin-text unit of study. Social Studies and the Young Learner, 21(3), 15-16.
Coelho, P. (2013, May 15). 30 SEC READING: The well of madness [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2013/
05/15/the-well-of-madness/ |
THE WELL OF MADNESS
Paulo Coelho A powerful wizard, who wanted to destroy an entire kingdom, placed a magic potion in the well from which all the inhabitants drank. Whoever drank that water would go mad. The following morning, the whole population drank from the well and they all went mad, apart from the king and his family, who had a well set aside for them alone, which the magician had not managed to poison. The king was worried and tried to control the population by issuing a series of edicts governing security and public health. The policemen and inspectors, however, had also drunk the poisoned water, and they thought the king’s decisions were absurd and resolved to take no notice of them. When the inhabitants of the kingdom heard these decrees, they became convinced that the king had gone mad and was now giving nonsensical orders. They marched on the castle and called for his abdication. In despair the king prepared to step down from the throne, but the queen stopped him, saying: ‘Let us go and drink from the communal well. Then we will be the same as them.’ The king and the queen drank the water of madness and immediately began talking nonsense. Their subjects repented at once; now that the king was displaying such wisdom, why not allow him to continue ruling the country? |
Wilhelm, J. D. (2012). Embracing alternative texts and literacies: Picture books. In Enriching comprehension with visualization strategies (pp. 68-69). New York, NY: Scholastic, Inc. |
Active Engagement
For the active engagement portion of this mini-lesson, students will complete the pre-reading activity for a hypothetical picture book launch to a novel unit on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. According to Wilhelm (2012), picture books are good starters for a unit and such an instructional approach can be used "even with middle and high school students." A picture book at the adolescent level "provides everyone with a successful reading experience, puts them all in the game, and provides a basic shared background experience." Therefore, an excerpt from Adam Rex's Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich serves as a motivational hook and activator of student prior knowledge on the archetypal monster in Shelley's classical work. The benefits of this picture book to launch Shelley's novel: - Foundational Take-Away: Establishes the monster as an outcast. - Text-to-Text Connection: Will the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein be able to put a positive spin on his life as a pariah as the one in Rex's story is able to do? - Strategy Preview/Practice on Lower-Risk/Easier Text: Students will be introduced to the S.T.O.R.Y. Picture It! strategy after reading the picture book. So by practicing on the picture book, they will be scaffolded to the requirement of using S.T.O.R.Y. on the finished novel. |
Active Engagement The students will receive a copy of the poem, Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich, to follow along with as the teacher reads it aloud. The teacher will not show the students its corresponding pictures until after students visualize and draw their own interpretations of the story for each S.T.O.R.Y. Picture It! letter. After hearing the story, students will complete the worksheet to the right and draw each plot element into its corresponding box. Students can refer back to their text copies of the poems. Students will volunteer to share their drawings, providing a brief rationale as to why they illustrated each the way they did. Then, to cross-check, students can then flip through the pages of the picture book and identify which of the illustrations would correspond to each S.T.O.R.Y. letter. |
Link
Students would have to synthesize their individual drawings for each S.T.O.R.Y. letter into one cohesive illustration, showcasing their understanding of how all the plot elements (all the important elements) work together to create the story. Students will be made aware that they will have to replicate this strategy at the end of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Students will pick up a handout on a "sister strategy" to the "Picture It! S.T.O.R.Y." activity, "Concept Muraling." Geared toward elementary and older students with learning disabilities, Concept Muraling operates around the same theory base and visual literacy that "Picture It!" does, but for informational texts.
Presentation Handouts and Poster: