The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

Since King’s text is a story about storytelling, King is able to both describe and demonstrate his ideas about storytelling in the same text. What are some of his key ideas about Native storytelling? What ideas does he have about storytelling in general? How do the content, structure, and style of his text reflect these ideas about storytelling?

Teaching Suggestion: This question is worded with the intention of giving you control over the length of time it takes to answer and/or discuss. When you introduce students to the question, you can specify the level of detail their answers should contain. For the first and second questions, you can offer examples of some of King’s ideas that might be too fine-grained to include versus the kinds of ideas you are actually seeking. Your choices in this area will, of course, impact how long it takes students to answer the final question. If you are particularly pressed for time, you might allow students to work in small groups and ask only for King’s key ideas and examples from his own text that support these, allowing examples to be drawn from content, structure, OR style.

Differentiation Suggestion: Students with executive function and attention challenges may benefit from seeing this topic as a series of separate questions rather than as a block of text.