There are two Sides to Every Story
Rationale:
There are two powerful strategies for comprehending text, one being summarization. Summarization is an important literacy goal because it helps students understand what has been read. By teaching children how to delete useless information and find or create a topic sentence that covers the main idea of the text, we can help students remember information that they read and gain better reading comprehension. This lesson will teach students how to summarize what they are reading and how to learn to find meaning in what they read.
Materials:
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A few copies of the real “The three little pigs” book (probably 5 copies)
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Paper and Pencils for each student
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Reading Journals
Procedure:
- Say: “Today we are going to talk about summarization. Does anyone know what it means to summarize a story? (Wait for response) Summarizing means understanding the important details of a story and being able to comprehend. Important details are main ideas, important characters, important statistics, or important events that happens to a character in the story. When you summarize, you only tell the big ideas of the story. A good way to decide if information is important is to ask yourself: “Is this information important to what the whole text is about?” Another way to figure out if the information is important is to look at the topic sentence. The topic sentence shows us what the paragraph is going to be about. If the information does not relate to its topic sentence, then it is probably not very important. To summarize you only need the important information.”
- Say: “We will be reading the story of the Three Little Pigs that we all know. The wolf blew the pig’s house down he started with the first pig whose house was made of straw, the second who used sticks, and the third who used bricks.”
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Review point of view with students and how the author uses it to show different characters in the story.
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Read The True Story of the Three Little Pigs as a group. To help students stay engaged, have students act out the characters. You may do this a few times to allow each student to play a role.
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Discuss the main idea of the story and who’s point of view was the story told.
- Say: “The main idea was that the wolf was not actually a bad guy, that he was telling his side of the story and what really happened was that he wanted to borrow a cup of sugar the whole time.”
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Make sure to ask questions like: whose point of view was this story from? The Wolf. How can we tell? Because he was telling his story.
- Review the original story of The Three Little Pigs and how the wolf is described as being mean, hungry, and huffing and puffing. Now compare that to The True Story of the Three Little Pigs where the wolf describes himself as being actually very nice and how he was just sneezing. Explain how the same thing is being interpreted two different ways from two different points of view.
- Have students create a Venn Diagrams to compare and contrast the two stories and the different points of view from the storytellers. The teacher will model how the Venn diagram should look and how it should be used with each story.
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Make sure to model what is expected of them.
- Say: “Now write an entry in their reading journals and using the evidence and facts they found in the two different stories they will write about who they believe and which story they feel is true. They will write using text evidence to support their claims of which they believe is true and share details from the point of view they believe.
- The teacher can review their Venn diagrams and journal entries to assess for understanding of point of view and use of text evidence to support their claims.
Practice Comprehension Question:
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Why do you think the first pig’s house was so easy to knock down?
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Would you be mad at the wolf if you were the pigs? Why?
References:
Lesson ideas from
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by: Jon Scieszka
Assessment ideas from
To return to application
http://wp.auburn.edu/rdggenie/home/classroom/applications/
