Story Map... a Kinder kind :)

So about 2 weeks ago I decided I NEEDED to make a story map anchor chart.  Look at what I was working with...

Ewww!!! 

(Knuffle Bunny is an adorable book and my kiddos LOVED when the baby "talks"! They thought it was hilarious and definitely a story they could relate to (lost toys)).

So I made a REAL anchor chart...

As you can see it is much improved.  My kiddos love to verbally fill it out and know the objective for reading a narrative text.  

Now that I have an appropriate and useful anchor chart I wanted to get my kiddos even more involved.  They are not ready to independently write but they can draw!! I first started out with just the title and the characters.

 We read The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog!.  It is a hilarious story and only has two characters and dialog, nothing else to distract the kiddos.  After we filled out the Story Map chart we passed out our own papers and got to work drawing the characters.

The kiddos did a really great job drawing the characters and we even talked about labeling them with their names!

The next day we moved onto focusing on setting.

We read The Napping House (where everyone is sleeping until something wakes them up). This is a great book to focus on setting because it stays the same till the very last page.  

The kiddos told me what the setting was and what I should draw to show it.  

Here is how some of the kiddos turned out:

Since my kiddos did such a great job on both characters and setting when we focused on them individually, I decided it was time to combined them and do both.  

We read the story Caramba (about a cat who should fly like the other cats but cannot).  We filled out the Story Map anchor chart and then we moved on to our own.

We drew the characters together on the SmartBoard.  Then we talked about the setting in the story again (outside in grass, the shore, or the ocean).  The kiddos could choose what they wanted to draw to represent the setting for the story.  Here is how one turned out:

 (I thought I took more pictures of some of the other kiddo's work but I cannot find them.  I will take more this week as we continue to work on setting and characters of each story we read.)

Happy Teaching!!