The ways that stories or narratives are put together compose their structure. This grammar includes the introduction of the characters and setting, a problem or set of obstacles that the main character must confront, a series of attempts to resolve the problem, and a resolution.
Published in Chapter:
Steamsational Writing: An Investigation Into Using Robots to Inspire Children's Narrative Skills
Marybeth Green (Texas A&M University, Kingsville, USA) and C. Lisa McNair (Texas A&M University, Kingsville, USA)
Copyright: © 2020
|Pages: 17
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-0246-4.ch008
Abstract
Providing young children with rich environments for writing has been a continuing quest for teachers in the early grades. This chapter investigates the use of Bee-bot robots as a means of creating a stimulating environment that engages second graders in the writing process and learning story grammar elements. Researchers met with the students weekly for an hour over six weeks. In the first week, students wrote an initial story and learned the basics of programming a Bee-bot robot. In subsequent weeks, students listened to a story set in the context of the Bee-bot mat, reviewed vocabulary words, planned a path for their robot, wrote a short story, and executed their robot program. There was a significant difference overall between the baseline story and the final story, and between the initial rating of each of the story grammar elements and the final rating of the elements, with the exception of Character.