Story Sequencing: What Happens Next?

Each story on this 1st grade page stops one frame short. Three washing lines carry three pictures each, and the fourth frame is a dashed box with a big question mark. Under every line wait three answer pictures, and the child circles the one that belongs in the question-mark frame. On the sheet shown an apple loses a bite, then another; a pink sheet of paper is cut into strips and the first strips are glued into rings; and a snowball rolls bigger and bigger until a second ball sits on top of the first. The answers are an apple core, a long paper chain and a finished snowman with a hat and a carrot nose.

Predicting the next event means using everything the pictures have shown so far. The choices are built to make children do that: one wrong choice in every row is the story's own first frame, the whole apple or the flat pink sheet, so a child who only looks for the same object gets caught, and the other wrong choice comes from a different story on the page. Reading the illustrations to work out what is happening is a first grade reading goal, and this page asks for it without a single word to decode.

One sheet, three stories, three circles, and the right answer sits in a different place in each row. Ask a child to explain the choice: because the bites get bigger is a better reason than because it is an apple. The base page of the story sequencing family puts all four pictures in order; this face keeps the order and asks only for the ending, which makes it a quick check.