Hearts, Candy, & Valentine Comprehension

 I have a student this year that needs to learn story vocabulary like characters, setting, beginning, middle, and end, etc.  but requires visual supports to aide in this learning process.  It is not always easy to find story grammar with visual cues unless of course you use a board maker program.  I wanted something a little more fun to work on this skill with my kiddos so I decided to create a valentine "mystery" for the students.  This allows me to also discuss another genre with the kids, which is a total BONUS.  Of course we started today out by connecting to the students prior knowledge about Valentine's Day!  I could almost see the sugar glaze in their eyes when they talked about the treats, cards, party, etc.

My main focus with the book is to work on comprehension skills like discussing characters, setting, problem, solution.  I also want the students to sequence story events visually in the correct order of beginning, middle, and end.  To target all of these skills, I created visual supports that accompanied the story.   Today, I discussed not only the genre with the students but the story vocabulary as well before reading the book.

 The students and I then read the book chorally.   Of course some groups required a little more support than other but all groups were able to answer the questions relating to the book especially with the visual supports.  Goal for tomorrow is to reread the book and answer comprehension questions about the story.
 

 I am hoping that the kids are successful with the following activities.  I am hoping that they are able to complete the a visual story event sequence independently (which is at times difficult when working with at risk students).  I made two versions for the students.  One version only has three events and the other has 4 story events.

I also want to check whether the students understand the meaning of vocabulary-- characters, setting, problem, and solution so I wrote questions for the students to respond to related to the for concepts I am targeting.   My major goal was to be able to check comprehension of the students who were not quite writing yet fluently.  So I came up with comprehension questions with visual responses.  I am very excited to try them out with my kinders tomorrow.

 Thanks for taking the time to check out my post.  I would love to hear your ideas and thoughts on using visuals or teaching comprehension.  The first FIVE people to comment can have my book, 22 visuals, and comprehension questions for free.