Building Strong Comprehension Bones-It's Elemental

Anyone who knows me as a teacher, understands how passionate I am about verbs being the backbone of creating word pictures, but that's a Thursday blog topic. Today is Elements of Literature Day on Teach it Write.

My feelings about how the elements of literature form the structure of any piece of literature-fiction and narrative non-fiction- are equally as fervent, though. Oh, each module can be a stand-alone entity, but one that would topple over with anything more than a wisp of air. Together, though... together these elements form a resilient structure that will support any in-depth study of literature and withstand the huffing and puffing from any skeptical wolf, no matter his or her costume.

Years before my book, The House of Comprehension was even a seed in my brain, or had taken root in my publisher's garden of teachers' resources (http://brigantinemedia.com/compass/), I created  a  presentation called, The Elements of Literature Power Point. This morning, I revised, clarified and updated this slide show. Not only is it now more visually pleasing for teachers and students, offering clearer content that teachers can use as their lessons' starting blocks, but it is also FREE.

English Language Arts teachers can utilize this slide show with their literature studies in a variety of ways. Here are two:

1. Present the whole show at once  as an introduction to the elements, or
2. Present each slide when its concept is the topic of the lesson.

Taught together with the text they are studying, teachers will help their students build  personal houses of comprehension by showing them how to expand their knowledge, to enhance their perception of the

 structure of texts, and to develop strong reading skills that will last them a lifetime. Students will become experts in analyzing:

1. The complexity and quality of the literary structure 
2. The importance of the setting to the story
3. The way characters mesh and clash to form the plot
4. The story's flow and the possibility for the characters' growth, and
5. How the tone,  theme,  symbols and point of view enhance the story, creating the subtext necessary for depth and meaning. 

This FREE ten-slide presentation enables teachers to help students to analyze literature in depth. Each slide

offers a visual lesson for Setting, Characters, Plot, Conflict, The World the Author Creates, Theme, Symbols, Tone and Literary Terms.

Teachers can show it as an overview or reinforcement lesson before analyzing a short story, a novel, narrative non-fiction, or as each element is introduced. I used this in English classes as well as Creative Writing classes when students were writing fiction.

By coordinating this FREE presentation with any literature study, teachers are ensuring that students are building strong houses of comprehension. This slide presentation addresses the Common Core Anchor Standards for Literature (R 1, 2,3, 5, 6 and 10) and Bloom's

Taxonomy's Remember/Understand, Apply, Analyze and Evaluate thinking skills.

Download this Free PowerPoint from: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Elements-of-Literature-PowerPoint and start a whole town of durable comprehension houses, with each structure revealing character, strong design elements and depth.

Happy Teaching,