Storyboard

Rationale
The storyboard teaching strategy helps students keep track of main ideas and
supporting details in a narrative by having them illustrate important scenes in a story.
Storyboarding can be used when texts are read aloud, or it can be used to help students
summarize and retain main ideas of a story they have read to themselves. Checking the
thoroughness and accuracy of students storyboards is an effective way to evaluate
reading comprehension before moving on to more analytic tasks.

Procedure
Step 1: Provide a storyboard template for students. The template should have several
blocks that are large enough for students to draw pictures with room for captions below.
You can find many storyboard templates online. There is also an example posted below.
Step 2: Ask students to draw the main ideas of a story. Students could do this after
hearing a story aloud or while reading a story to themselves. Each drawing should have
a short caption explaining what is happening in the picture. You could also have
students use relevant quotations from the story as captions.
Step 3: You can ask students to compare storyboards with a partner or a small group.
How are their storyboards similar? How are they different? This discussion can help
students clarify basic ideas in the text and can also help them analyze which ideas are
most important.