Begin with the basic elements of character, plot, setting, and theme. Ask simple questions and once that understanding is evident, dive deeper.

Who are the characters in the story?

Does the character change during the story? How? Give examples.

What is the setting in the story? How did you know where the story took place? Did the author tell you in words or pictures? Did you have to infer?

What is the problem of the story? Give evidence to support this.

How was the problem resolved? Give evidence to support this.

Students must learn that summaries include the most important details of a story.

Break the story into sections for students to summarize. Emergent readers do a nice job of drawing summaries while developing readers are able to write 1 – 2 sentence summaries.

Read through p. 16 and stop. Ask students to summarize what has happened up to this point in the story. (This is the beginning.)

Read p. 17 – p. 22 and stop. Ask students to summarize what happened during this section of the text. (This is the middle.)

Read p. 23 – end of story. Ask students to summarize what happened during this section of the text. (This is the end.)

Then, have students put all three summaries together to represent their total summary of the story. This also works well when discussing beginning, middle, and end.

Have students repeat a selection of text several times until they are able to read it smoothly, accurately, and with expression. This text has a repeated chunk of text that works well for this strategy:

Pgs. 5 & 10, and pgs. 16 & 20 —“You worry too much,” said her mother....

Although this text does not have many complex words, there are manyopportunities to use prior knowledge to understand what the author is trying to say. Without the proper background knowledge, some of the author’s statements will not make sense. Discuss the following statements from the text and their meaning:

P.3 – “Mama, what if I shrink?” – Why would Wemberly think she would shrink? (Children who aren’t aware that water makes your skin shrivel/wrinkle will not understand this statement.)

P. 7 – the noise the radiators made – What is a radiator? What kind of noise do they make?

P. 8 – At the playground... - Why would Wemberly worry about the chains on the swings, bolts on the slide, and bars on the jungle gym?