Language Arts - What Happens Next

You will need photocopies of all the pictures from the story - one for each sheet or card.

What to do:

• Discuss the children's daily morning routines. What do they do first? Then what happens until they go to school? You may want to have the children draw their routines to reinforce the idea of sequencing.
• Reread The Gingerbread Man. Use only three or four "main plot" cards at first, adding the "detail" cards as children begin to understand meaning.
• Talk about what happens first, etc., then put out the story cards for the children to arrange by themselves. Then have them mix up the cards to tell a different story.
• Relate the arrangement of the picture cards to the arrangement of the words in the book: in order for the story to sound "right", the words need to tell the beginning of the story, then in the middle, then the end.

Open-ended Questions:

• Why do you do your morning routine in that order? What would happen if you changed the order?

Variations/Extensions:

• After discussing the order of the children's morning routine, take one of the routines (or your own routine) and reverse the order. Does the story sound strange? Discuss why.
• Provide sequence puzzles for the children.

Related Resources:

• The Backward Day by Ruth Krauss
• I'm Going on a Bear Hunt by Sandra Stroner Sivulich

Suggested Benchmarks:

• Language Arts - Relate prior knowledge to new information.
• Math - Construct a sense of time.
• Analyze and evaluate information acquired from various sources.