Tell Me a Story - Storybooks That Teach Critical Thinking

Author(s):  Cherie Plant & Stephanie Winans-Stevens

This fun, easy to use picture book is made up of two stories.  Students tell each story by analyzing the pictures and responding to the guided questions on each page.  The questions engage and produce a deeper analysis of the scene and the storyline by encouraging students to provide details, describe events, explain motives, make evidence-based predictions, and use cause and effect leading up to the scene.  Each story develops these important critical and creative thinking skills.

• Observation


• Identifying and evaluating evidence


• Comparing and contrasting shapes and objects


• Inference (evidence-based prediction)


• Cause and effect


• Identify and describing a sequence of events

These stories also develop pre-reading skills.  Pre-readers progress from “listening” to a story to “telling” a story, becoming more engaged in the reading process as they identify and shape the storyline.  Reading involves more than just decoding written text.  A large part of reading is gaining meaning from symbols—both letters and pictures.