Story Sequencing Sentences: Match the Pictures

Reading does the work on this 1st grade page. Eight small pictures run down the left and eight printed sentences run down the right, two stories of four, and both columns are jumbled. Every sentence card has an empty dashed box for a number, and a dot sits beside each picture and each sentence for the line. On the sheet shown the first story is a paper chain: there is one sheet of paper, the sheet is cut into five strips, two strips are glued into rings, all five rings make a chain. The second is a banana: it is not peeled, one strip of peel hangs down, three strips hang down, only the empty peel is left. The child numbers each story's sentences 1 to 4, then draws a line from every sentence to its picture.

No sentence starts with a time word, so the order has to come from what the sentences say. A chain cannot come before its rings, and three strips of peel cannot come before one; on the sheet shown a careful reader numbers the paper story 4, 1, 3, 2 from the top and the banana 2, 3, 1, 4. The matching then checks the same details against the pictures: five strips, two rings, one strip of peel, three strips. A picture of rings beside a stack of strips only fits the sentence about two rings, so a child cannot guess from the object alone. Putting events in order and reading for detail are both first grade reading goals, and this page asks for each.

Eight boxes, eight lines. No picture sits straight across from its own sentence, and the first sentence of a story is not always at the top of its block, so the layout gives nothing away. Read the paper story aloud together, then let children do the banana on their own. This is the reading face of the family; the next step is the retell page, where children write sentences like these themselves, with First, Next, Then and Finally printed on the lines to start them.