Parts of a Story: Beginning, Middle, Ending

Following on from the previous post wherein they learnt what an ending was, this time we combined learning about "beginning" and "middle" together.

This time, I asked the girls to choose two books each - again, ones they were familiar with. Funnily enough, the one pictured above chose the same books as last time. 😂 Rather than read through the books again, I asked them to summarise what each story was about (another skill in itself!) which we did together verbally.

Then I got some Post-It notes, 3 for each book, and wrote a summary of the beginning, middle and ending for each book on the bottom of the Post-Its (based on our discussion) while the girls wrote the headings on their A4 paper - copying from the whiteboard.

Because they chose different books, they needed to do the work individually. Simply, they needed to put the Post-Its in the correct order and then place them underneath the correct heading. I checked with them when they thought they were done and then they glued them down. When they were finished, they could then draw a picture to represent each part.

We clarified that the beginning goes at the start, the ending finishes the story off and the middle is all the rest that happens in between! To be honest, the concept wasn't difficult since we use this as everyday vocabulary anyway. 👍

When they're older we can then expand this into the standard "story mountain" model, splitting up the main components further. This level of detail is fine for now, though, with "middle" being the main chunk of the story. 😀