Understanding characters and the way they behave are important skills for students to have. Share a story as a class. Pick a selection of characters from the story and discuss the main characteristics, making notes on the whiteboard. Select some students to play these characters. Do not tell the rest of the class who is playing which character. The other students ask the characters questions to try to discover who they are. Make sure your class knows the difference between open and closed questions so that they are able to get lots of information from the character.
Help students to understand the structure of a story and the way in which events cause other events to happen. With your class, write out the main events of the story on the whiteboard. Before the next lesson, write these events on strips of paper. You may want to laminate the strips as the students will be handling them. Separate students into groups and give each group a strip. Students must organize themselves into the correct order of the story.
At the elementary level it is important that students develop their comprehension through making connections between events and characters in stories and events and people in the world and in their own lives. Discuss characters from stories; do your students know anyone like that character? Why are they alike? Talk about events in stories. Have students had any similar events happen to them? What did they do? How did they feel? Encourage students to write about their experiences and the people they know.
Guided reading is not just about teaching the skills necessary to read. It also provides an opportunity to discuss characters and events in stories. Guided reading should be used to focus on a specific teaching point. By dividing students into groups according to need, you can ensure that this teaching point is relevant to the progress the group needs to make. Guided reading gives you an opportunity to work with each child in your class and also allows children to take part in dialogical learning.