Narrative Know-How
A Fresh Approach to Support Comprehension and Craft in the K–6 Classroom
Corwin Literacy
Teach your students to grasp the structure of narratives with this simple, yet powerful approach!
Teaching text structure has never been easier or more engaging. Narrative Know-How: A Fresh Approach to Support Comprehension and Craft in the K–6 Classroom equips educators with innovative tools to help students understand the structure of stories, improving both their reading comprehension and their ability to craft compelling narratives. Through his unique Mood Structures strategy, Trevor Bryan offers a simple yet powerful way for students to connect with fiction and nonfiction texts alike. Whether you're aiming to boost engagement, make complex ideas more accessible, or bring joy back to your literacy lessons, this book delivers.
Designed to help young readers and writers thrive, this resource focuses on actionable strategies and practical lessons tested in real classrooms. Teachers will gain the tools they need to develop students’ narrative comprehension, improve written expression, and foster critical thinking skills.
Offering a fresh approach to comprehension and narrative writing, this research-backed book
- Provides a proven instructional sequence that connects reading and writing to enable students to seamlessly build comprehension and composition skills
- Addresses key narrative elements such as mood, symbolism, and themes in both reading and writing through 20 classroom-tested lessons
- Helps students understand narrative principles with more than 20 extensive mentor texts examples and accompanying deconstructions
- Includes original illustrations from the award-winning author-illustrator, Jarrett Lerner, visual tools, graphic organizers and guided response sheets that enhance engagement and make the approach easy to access for every learner
Trevor Bryan’s groundbreaking instructional strategies make literacy instruction purposeful, practical, and fun. With Narrative Know-How, educators will inspire their students to think critically, write skillfully, and read with deeper insight.
"Trevor Bryan’s Narrative Know-How is an essential resource for any elementary classroom, offering a straightforward, bottom-up approach that elevates both reading comprehension and an understanding of author’s craft. With a focus on Mood Structures, reading comprehension becomes visually accessible for students and teachers alike, creating a seamless connection between reading and writing. When students have a clear mental representation of text structure, they can easily engage with key components of any narrative piece, both fiction and nonfiction, in order to set a purpose for reading, make predictions, infer, summarize, and draw conclusions about themes and symbolism. The included scaffolded response and planning sheets ensure students are set up for success in both analyzing texts and crafting their own narratives. Backed by heavy research, this approach can be used with any literacy program, bringing joy to teaching and learning. I can’t wait to plan with teachers using this book!"
"Trevor Bryan’s Narrative Know-How: A Fresh Approach to Support Comprehension and Craft in the K–6 Classroom shows how using a small set of high-utility tools across units, grades, and settings can provide on-ramps to high-level thinking skills across the literacy block. By connecting his classroom-tested tools, including Mood Structures and Access Lenses, to recent and robust research around the sciences of reading, Narrative Know-How prepares classroom teachers and instructional specialists to simplify and streamline joyful literacy learning."
"Fans of Trevor’s first book, The Art of Comprehension, will find new tools and inspiration here. Mood remains meaningful, but the author offers a bigger and bolder set of intentions. Narrative Know-How paves the way for composition as readers are introduced to four essential story principles and practical strategies for applying them."
"Narrative Know-How is more than a professional development book. It is an insightful and engaging guide that transforms how we think, talk, and teach stories. With clear strategies, thought-provoking lessons, and supporting tools that stretch across all levels and abilities, this book is a game-changer for educators looking to lift their students’ critical thinking."
"Trevor Bryan has a gift for making complex ideas simple, accessible, and joyful. His work has profoundly transformed my teaching, reshaping how I understand stories and, as a result, reshaping how my students comprehend and craft stories. After engaging with Trevor’s work, you’ll find yourself viewing every story through the lens of mood—it’s the powerful missing piece that educators didn’t know they were searching for."