Lesson Four: One of the first ways to scaffold story telling in my class was to teach the students how to make a story map. A story map is a series of pictures that helps the teller to remember the sequence of events in the story. After telling the story “The Tailor” to my students, I had them draw the five different pieces of clothing that the tailor sewed. Each piece of clothing represented one part of the story line. We used a strip of paper and made sure that pictures they drew were simple – with little detail and no words. During the story telling I had introduced each section of the story with a picture that I had drawn.
From previous lessons, I knew that my young artists needed some drawing direction. So, to further scaffold this process, I provided the students with pictures that they could copy. I noticed that as the students worked, they spoke about the story, repeated the patterns and talked about the order. Drawing these pictures was helping them to internalize the story and begin the retelling process.
Scaffolding used: story mapping, providing picture examples for the students to copy