Effective with students of all ages
- Provides opportunities to develop critical thinking skills through comparisons of entities such as two or more stories, characters, objects, processes.
- Provides opportunities to use language to communicate, inform, and negotiate
- Connects ASL to written English
- Reinforces reading and writing skills
- Promotes critical thinking skills
Strategy steps:
(If students are comparing two entities, a Venn diagram is a good strategy to use.)
- Select two or three different nursery rhymes, fairy tales, or children’s stories that you have read to the children.
- Reread them to students, if necessary.
- Explain that they must find ways the selections are similar and ways they are different.
- As children identify similarities and differences, write them on the board.
- For example, if the stories were “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” “The Three Little Pigs,” and “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” the lists of similarities and differences might look like this:
- How are the stories the same?
- The stories all have animals in them.
- They all have animal groups of three.
- The animals in the stories can talk.
- The stories are all pretend.
- How are the stories different?
- One story has a person (a little girl) in it.
- One story has a wolf.
- One story has trolls.
- Have students, individually or in pairs, write a paragraph explaining the similarities and differences of the three stories.
- Children share their paragraphs with classmates and discuss differences.