Franklin Table

This Franklin table evolved from a discussion about characters in Franklin stories.  We looked at 2 stories and started to compare which characters were in each story.  The children were very involved  and loved looking for new characters.  We looked at which characters were in both stories or what new characters we were to meet. As we looked at more stories we had to add on more columns as more characters were introduced.  This was so exciting, the children were jumping off the floor when they noticed a new character that we could add to our table. 

The Franklin table was an excellent teaching tool for a variety of reasons.  The children were able to identify who the characters were in the stories.  The children could differentiate between a character and a prop.  The children were familiar with labeling the parts of a story, for example: title, author, illustrator, character, prop, beginning, middle and end..  The children were able to read the table, identifying how many stories Bear was in or which character was in the most stories or in the least.  The children were able to count how many characters were in all of the stories we read.  The children helped fill in the table, telling me where the title should be written, where to write in new characters and they were able to check off the correct boxes for the characters that were involved in the particular story.  There were many times that the students would say that we need to add in more spaces for more stories or that there is only one more space for one more character.  This activity integrated a lot of learning and there is so much potential to take the learning further. 

One way that I would like to enrich this activity is to put the children in small groups with a leader and  to compare the characters in two stories. I would then like the children to create a Venn diagram illustrating which characters were in both and which were exclusive to that particular story. 

Here is a picture of a portion of our table.

The titles of the stories we read were written vertically on the left hand side.

The characters were written along the top of the table