Narrative Input Charts (GLAD)

 I'm so grateful that I was able to become a GLAD certified educator early in my career. This week long training I took several years ago has really changed the way I teach and stuck with me. While I have a lot to learn, there are some strategies that I use regularly in my classroom. Narrative Input Charts are one of my favorite strategies to get students excited, connected, and thinking to our learning material.

Top Tips For Narrative Input Charts:

1. Choose a powerful text 

Whenever possible use texts from perspectives that might be missing in your curriculum. At the beginning of the year I use Narrative Input Charts to show the perspective of the Indigenous People in Pre-Columbian North America. A Boy Called Slow by Joseph Bruchac is a great text to help students connect to what it was like to live in the great plains.







2. Include interesting pictures

Students are hooked by good pictures in stories. Teaching the upper grades it is especially important to include images that aren't cartoony. I love using primary sources in Narrative Input Charts because we can use them in a separate lesson on the primary sources and then call back to them with this strategy. They are also real and this is something that students care about. Another option that can be a great team task, is for students to create images of their own that could be used in a narrative input chart.




Kevin A. Williams is an amazing artist that I recommend.



3. Target vocabulary ahead of time 

Choose words that may be unfamiliar to your students in meaning or use in this context. I love how The 1619 Project has vocabulary already selected to help with reading the text Born on the Water. 



4. number your pages and highlight vocabulary

This really helps when your pages get mixed up or a student misses the cue to bring up the word.



5.  Leave room for student creativity 

Students love to create the dialogue, thought bubbles, images, and background for retellings. Let them create these and even a comic strip to show the key details from the text. It supports synthesizing the information and is an important way for students to connect to the text. This year students have really enjoyed making drawings of characters from our literature circle books and then turning those drawings into puppets.



Here is a video with some tips for creating your own Narrative Input Chart:

 



If you want to see some examples of what a Narrative Input Chart looks like check out the videos below:




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