This unit continues the yearlong theme of what it means to be a good person in a community by pushing students to think about how the lessons and morals from traditional stories and folktales connect to their own lives and communities. The unit launches by listening to the book A Story, A Story, in which students see the power of storytelling not only for entertainment, but also for learning valuable life lessons. Over the course of the unit, students will explore lessons and morals about hard work, happiness, friendship, honesty, and humility. Through discussion and writing, students will be challenged to connect their own lives with the sometimes-abstract lessons and stories in order to build character and a strong community. It is our hope that this unit, in connection with other units in the sequence, will help students internalize the idea that we not only learn from our own experiences, but we also learn and grow by hearing the experiences of others.

In reading, this unit builds on the foundation set in unit 1. Students will continue to practice asking and answering questions about key details in partners, individually, and in discussion, although questions will require a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the text than in unit 1. Students will learn to use the text and illustrations to both identify the setting of a story and think about why the setting is important to the story. Students will also be pushed to deeply analyze characters traits, actions, and feelings and how those change and evolve over the course of the story. Once students have a deep understanding of the setting and character motivation, students will grapple with figuring out the lessons the characters learn and how they learn them. Finally, in this unit students will begin to notice the nuanced vocabulary authors use to help a reader visualize how a character is feeling or acting.

In writing, students will continue to write daily in response to the text. The focus of this unit is on ensuring that students are answering the question correctly and using correct details from the illustrations and text to support their answer.

This video is part of the Learn and Grow with WHRO TV series. Watch Carolyn Harris teach about friendship and retelling stories.

Students will identify the characters, setting, and sequential events of a story and draw a picture summary including the main points and eliminating extra details. Abstraction is the act of eliminating extra information, so students will try to include only the bare essentials to tell the story elements. The teacher will assist them in finding elements that are important to include and students will work in groups of 3 to tell the beginning, middle, and end in a pictorial representation.These materials were created by CodeVA in partnership with George Mason University and were funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant Award #1837380

Through the use of a choose-your-own-adventure style read aloud, the teacher will guide students to create an algorithm for the story they are creating within the book. This lesson also serves as a basic introduction into the process behind computer programs, including games, when the user makes a decision.