Story Sequencing Cards

When I was little, playing school was one of my favorite things to do. Sometimes when my friends came over that is what we would play together. I have a very vivid memory of playing school one afternoon with a friend and when her mother came to get her, I carefully informed her as to what my friend needed to work on. I can't remember what the mother replied, she was probably too dumbstruck to actually formulate a response. I might have been a bit much during my childhood.

I was thinking about that story today because our church runs a free tutoring program for area children during the summer and I volunteered to help. Today was our first day. One of the things I like about teaching is figuring out why someone isn't understanding something and what I can do to remedy that. Since I've had a lot of non-traditional learner's around here I have collected a lot of tools and activities to help teach various concepts. I loaded up a bag of some of my collection to use at tutoring. When I was talking with the organizer of the tutoring program, I said I'd send a blog link about how I use story sequencing cards to work on reading comprehension. It seems while I did mention them in a post on reading comprehension, I only write about them briefly. I though a slightly more in-depth post might be useful. So... Story sequencing cards.

First, if you aren't familiar with them, they are small cards with different parts of a story. The child is meant to order the cards so the story makes sense.  Here's an example.

While they are wonderful for their designed task, I think they have far more potential than just ordering stories. Here is a brief description of how I used them with H. to help with comprehension.

Step 1: We ordered the story cards as they were meant to be used. (I read the captions underneath each card out loud.) We would also discuss the story so I could be absolutely sure she understood what was going on. I also worked on vocabulary because there were so many holes in her English vocabulary.

Step 2: I had H. read the captions out loud, matching any nouns to the item on the card. 

Step 3: I had her tell me the story on each card in her own words.

Step 4: She copied the text onto lined paper. After she had written each caption I cut them apart.

Step 5: She would match the card with each of the pictures. It didn't really matter that the text was still on the card. Her writing and the printed text were so different for her that it didn't matter. 

Step 6: I mixed up her written descriptions and had her read them and order them without the pictures. 

If it seemed necessary, I would add two more steps.

Step 7: I would have her dictate what was happening in each card and I would write it, then I would have her read her own words. 

Step 8: H. would draw her own pictures for each description. Then using her own words and her own pictures we would repeat steps 5 and 6.

Don't think this was the work of one day. Working with one story could take one to two weeks depending on how involved I made it.  We probably did this for much of one school year. It was from here that I needed to create a different tool for supporting reading comprehension that we moved to. 

Since I'm on a role, they could also be used as creative writing prompts of filling in more to the story on the cards. You could use them for what if? discussions. In the example above, you could ask, "What would happen if the boy ran out of paint? What could he do?" Which is an easy way to practice flexible thinking. You could have a child create their own original sequence cards with their own stories and artwork. You could mix up a few stories and see if some type of coherent narrative could be created. As you can tell, these are one of those teaching tools that can be endlessly flexible.