 This is a lesson I like to teach with a small group of three or four students, ages four and five. So this is when we are going to be learning about story structure, specifically a three-part story. So we'll start with something simple like my story cards and we sequence them together. So in this one I have a seed. In this picture I have a little sprout and in this picture it's a plant. And so we're going to put these in the right sequence. We'll fit them together and then I will tell a little story to the kids. In the beginning there was just a seed. In the middle the seed is a sprout. At the end the sprout turned into a flower. So what they're learning and I'm modeling for them is beginning, middle and end. So we'll practice that and I'll have them tell me the story back to me. And then when we're done with that I'll give them their own. And we'll mix it up and I'll say to them we'll get them all out and we'll put them in the right order. So here is one snowball. The squirrel now has two snowballs. And then at the end we have a snowman. So we'll put it in order. The kids will then try to tell me a story. I will try not to help too much. They'll say in the beginning squirrel had one snowball. In the middle squirrel had two snowballs. At the end he made a snowman. And I'll be so happy for them because they tried so hard to tell me. And what's important is to be happy for anything they're trying to tell you that has a three part structure of beginning, middle and end. If they try to just tell you about the end redirect them back to the beginning and say whoops you forgot to tell me what happened in the beginning. And then you try it again but this time you can help them a little bit more about beginning, middle and end.