What your child is learning
about Stories
Part One
Often early readers will read
through a book without considering the meat of the story itself. Simple
decoding such as this makes comprehension all but a lost cause. There’s a
nationwide misnomer out there that recognition of the finer elements of a story
is a middle school endeavor. This couldn’t be further from the truth. I’m not
joking when I say that I believe that literary analysis is a simple concept
easily understood by your average two-year old. One only needs a look at the
emotional involvement on the face of a toddler when Dinosaur Roar is the read of the day.
Compare that to the engagement of your average seventh grader in the midst of a
short story unit. Recognizing and understanding the plot, character and setting
of a story is child’s play. As long as the reading is on level with the child’s understanding, such comprehension is instinctive.
Where we fail them, however, is that we do not teach them how to assign meaning
to what they already comprehend. This year, the
When I teach reading, I
always use the car engine as a metaphor to illustrate the balance between simply
decoding and comprehending a story. We don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a
car. We know where the engine is, that it needs oil and fuel to run, and it
requires antifreeze to stay at temperature. For most of us, our day-to-day
functioning requires no additional knowledge of the internal combustion engine.
Much like a student who reads only for decoding, we never really stop to think
about the many, many essential parts that must work in perfect synchronicity to
keep the pistons firing and the wheels turning. A successful mechanic
understands the function of each individual element in this complex machine in
ways the majority of us never will. A successful reader will view a story in
the same manner, breaking it down into not just plot, character and setting but
recognizing the sub-elements that comprise each of them.
In the next few newsletters,
we’ll be examining each of the main elements of a story, breaking them down
into individual components and looking at how Walden works to communicate this
same skill to your child. We will begin next week with plot and the importance of recognizing the main conflict that serves as its foundation.