story friends program overview.pdf
Program Overview
What Is Story Friends?
Story Friends™ is a research-based, supplemental Tier 2 intervention program for use in preschool and kindergarten classrooms. The program includes interactive storybooks and audio recordings used together to develop vocabulary, concepts, and comprehension skills. At small group listening centers, children listen to recorded stories and lessons that encourage interactive responses. During each 10- to 15-minute session, children listen to a story, engage in vocabulary activities, and respond to comprehension questions that promote critical thinking.
Story Friends Is Easy and Fun to Implement in Your Classroom!
The Story Friends program is designed to work in the preschool or kindergarten classroom by fitting into a typical early childhood schedule and requiring minimal advanced preparation—the instruction is all prerecorded. Simply add the program to your daily center rotation or small group time. Children will enjoy the stories, likable characters, and colorful illustrations.
Story Friends Components at a Glance
Story Friends
Story Friends Employs Best Practices to Accelerate Skills Development
Children who participate in Story Friends develop oral language skills and acquire challenging vocabulary. They also practice listening comprehension by responding to questions about stories and characters to help develop their critical thinking skills. In addition to vocabulary growth, children gain experience with academic activities common in preschool and kindergarten settings that employ best practices for learning.
Skills Best Practices
- Oral language ● Explicit teaching and modeling
- Vocabulary ● Repeated readings
- Comprehension ● Multiple exposures to vocabulary
- Critical thinking ● Student engagement
- Listening ● Small group intervention
- Phonological awareness ● Recursive instruction
- Concepts of print ● Formative and summative assessments
- Social-emotional ● Staff development
Research Base
Children’s Vocabulary Acquisition for Story Friends
Using the Jungle Friends Series
Although Story Friends has wide appeal to young children, the embedded lessons in the stories are designed to promote language development among children who are at risk for reading difficulties due to underdeveloped oral language skills. Thus, the research focused on the effects of the program on vocabulary and oral language development with at-risk prekindergarten populations. Also, teachers have implemented this curriculum with kindergarten children who are exhibiting delays in oral language development with good success.
8 7 Number of Words Mastered 6 5 ■ Nonparticipants 4 ■ Participants 3 2 1 Before Series After Series
From Research to Practice
Years of research show and experts agree on how curriculum best meets the needs of early childhood
| Preschool Developmental and Programmatic Needs | Story Friends Delivers |
|---|---|
| Language skills | Program vocabulary words with picture supports in each storybook provide child-friendly definitions, multiple opportunities to say the words and definitions, meaning from context, and examples from daily experiences. |
| Comprehension, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills | Inferential questions from each story challenge children to think critically and problem solve. Intervention lessons model responses, and think-alouds explain reasoning. |
| Listening skills | Small group listening centers provide opportunities to practice listening skills; visual cues guide children to stay on task and focus their attention. |
| Phonological awareness | Rhyming story text facilitates learning of an important aspect of phonological awareness. |
| Concepts of print | Explicit instruction guides children to follow the words of a book's title, turn pages, point to elements in images, and manipulate book flaps on cue. |
| Social-emotional development | A recurring cast of characters fosters children's social awareness and develops their sense of empathy as they relate to everyday occurrences and social situations. |
| Explicit teaching and modeling | Child-friendly vocabulary definitions are stated explicitly, and modeling and think-alouds provide context and examples of reasoning for appropriate responses. |
| Multiple exposures to new vocabulary and language | Children receive four vocabulary and two concept words lessons, as well as guided instruction on three comprehension questions, for a total of nine explicit lessons for each 10- to 15-minute Listening Center session. |
| Repeated readings | Children listen to each storybook three times to ensure multiple exposures to instruction. |
| Recursive instruction | Intervention lessons model and guide the acquisition of language skills. Children can listen to other responses and have time to reflect on their own, and children can try out new learning during individual progress monitoring opportunities. |
| Assessments | Children's progress is monitored during Listening Center sessions to ensure that listening and responding occur appropriately. Individually administered assessments evaluate acquisition of vocabulary and concept words. |
| Professional development | Teachers have access to multimedia modules to ensure program implementation with fidelity. |
Program Components
Student Components
Storybooks
The Story Friends program provides two series of storybooks, Jungle Friends and Forest Friends.
The Story Friends storybooks showcase:
- Embedded vocabulary
- Colorful, engaging illustrations
- Rhyming text
- “Discovery flaps” that promote active engagement.
Audio Recordings
Story Friends provides explicit instruction for embedded vocabulary within storybooks. High-level vocabulary develops oral language at an accelerated pace to get children on-level. Each vocabulary lesson includes:
- Child-friendly definitions.
- Opportunities to repeat the words and definitions.
- Opportunities to respond in an interactive format.
- Information about word meaning in context.
- Examples from real-life experiences.
Comprehension
Interactive story questions help develop critical thinking and comprehension skills, such as predicting and inferring. Each comprehension lesson includes:
- Sample answers to questions.
- Think-alouds that model reasoning.
Discovery Flaps
Discovery flaps promote natural curiosity as children respond to prompts and interact with images.
Explicit Instruction
Wanda the Word Wolf, the program narrator, appears within storybooks to indicate explicit instruction at points of engagement.
Teacher Components
Teacher Guide
The Story Friends Teacher Guide provides everything you need to know about the program and its implementation.
- Program overview and components
- Scope and sequence of skills
- Implementation guidelines
- Audio scripts
- Placement and assessments
- Blackline resource masters
- Research base
Program Implementation Modules
Story Friends supports staff development by providing multimedia Program Implementation Modules. These modules illustrate helpful tips for implementing the program with fidelity, ensuring that children in your classroom get the support they need to help them get on-level.
USB Content
The Story Friends USB includes the MP3 audio files and full audio scripts that correspond with each of the storybooks. Wanda the Word Wolf narrates each story in the Story Friends series to the children and leads them through the intervention. The USB also contains reproducible and fillable assessment and tracking forms to help monitor children’s progress and log children’s attendance and pacing of program implementation.
Assessment
The Story Friends progress monitoring assessments appear in the Teacher Guide and on the USB and include Unit Vocabulary and Concept Words Assessments. Assessment Cards are included for practical assessments with children.
Implementing Story Friends
An Easy Three-Step Model!
The Story Friends program makes it easy for you to implement its Tier 2 supplemental intervention curriculum in three easy steps:
➊ Identify. ➋ Implement. ➌ Assess.
STEP 1 Identify.
Identify children who will benefit from using Story Friends.
The first step in implementing Story Friends is to identify children in your classroom who will benefit from using the program. These will be children who have limited oral language skills or are demonstrating delays in oral vocabulary and comprehension. Information from universal screening and progress monitoring assessments can be used to identify children who are good candidates for using the Story Friends supplemental curriculum.
STEP 2 Implement.
Implement the intervention at the Listening Center.
The Story Friends intervention is delivered at the Listening Center in 10- to 15-minute sessions. A facilitator—a teacher or another adult such as an assistant teacher, paraprofessional, or parent—is present to guide and monitor children. At the Listening Center, children follow along as they listen to storybooks and participate in interactive vocabulary and comprehension lessons. Optimally, three children in need of intervention gather at the Listening Center at one time.
STEP 3 Assess.
Administer progress monitoring assessments.
In Story Friends, learning of instructional targets is assessed using curriculum-based measures. There are two measures for vocabulary. Vocabulary acquisition is measured using Unit Vocabulary Assessments, administered after four weeks of instruction, and Concept Words Assessments, administered before and after each book series, Jungle Friends and Forest Friends.
Program Pacing
Story Friends contains 26 storybooks, each used across a five-day period. Children listen to each storybook three times—one listening session on each of the first three days of your week. Repeated readings of each book ensure that children receive multiple exposures to the rich vocabulary and comprehension instruction.
| Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st listen | 2nd listen | 3rd listen | Make-up | Make-up |
Key Program Elements
Vocabulary In each Story Friends instructional book, interactive lessons introduce two new vocabulary words that include explicit, child-friendly definitions and multiple opportunities to respond. The vocabulary words selected for each storybook challenge children to expand their word knowledge in ways that will be useful in a school setting and will have the most impact on their language skills and future reading comprehension. The Story Friends vocabulary words are:
- Relevant to children’s daily lives and useful across many content areas.
- Words that occur frequently in adult conversations and in texts children will encounter in school.
- Examples of rich language, including descriptive verbs and adjectives that exemplify shades of meaning.
- Likely to be unfamiliar to many preschoolers, but provide opportunities for vocabulary expansion.
- Difficult to learn from context without explicit instruction and multiple exposures.
Concept Words Each Story Friends book provides instruction on one or two basic concepts, such as up/down, many/few, and all.
Comprehension Questions The Story Friends program provides children opportunities to respond to stories and their characters, using comprehension skills. Each storybook prompts children to respond to three comprehension questions. After each prompt, children have time to reflect and respond before hearing a model and the reasoning for an appropriate response. The comprehension questions are primarily open-ended, inferential questions for which the answer is not explicitly stated in the text. Children must use information in the story and their own background knowledge to make inferences about character emotions and actions, predictions about future events, and connections to their lives.