Narrative graphic organizers are a simple tool that can unlock stronger storytelling, richer language samples, and better generalization across therapy sessions. In this episode, I’m sharing four practical ways to use a narrative graphic organizer with students across grade levels—whether you’re targeting personal narratives, story retells, or literacy-based therapy goals. These strategies are easy to implement, highly flexible, and designed to reduce overwhelm while supporting clear narrative structure.
In this episode, you’ll learn how to:
- Use graphic organizers to scaffold personal narratives
- Build pre-story knowledge before reading a book or article
- Support accurate and meaningful story retells
- Create parallel stories to promote generalization
If you want to see these strategies in action and grab free graphic organizers, check out my on-demand SLP Summit course for a deeper dive.
Narrative skills play a critical role in academic success, literacy development, and social communication. Students with language disorders often struggle with narrative macrostructure—such as organizing characters, settings, events, and resolutions—which can impact both oral and written language performance. One widely used, evidence-aligned support for narrative instruction is the narrative graphic organizer.
Narrative graphic organizers provide a visual framework that helps students organize ideas, reduce cognitive load, and produce more complete and cohesive narratives.
Below are four practical ways to use narrative graphic organizers in speech therapy across grade levels and therapy contexts.
1. Use a Narrative Graphic Organizer for Personal Narratives
Personal narratives are functional, motivating, and highly relevant for students. However, many students benefit from explicit support when organizing personal experiences into a coherent story.
Using a narrative graphic organizer, students can visually map out:
- Who was involved
- Where and when the event occurred
- What happened first, next, and last
- How the situation was resolved
Students may draw simple pictures or add keywords before verbally retelling the story. This approach reduces overwhelm and supports clearer, more organized language output.
Why this Works:
Research on narrative intervention highlights the importance of explicit instruction in story structure and opportunities to produce narratives with visual supports (Spencer & Slocum, 2010; Petersen, Gillam, & Gillam, 2008).
2. Build Pre-Story Knowledge Before Reading
Narrative graphic organizers can also be used before reading a story to activate background knowledge and preview narrative structure.
After a brief book walk, students can use the organizer to:
- Predict characters and settings
- Anticipate possible problems or events
- Practice telling a predicted version of the story
This strategy allows SLPs to identify gaps in vocabulary or world knowledge early and provides meaningful narrative practice prior to reading.
Why This Works:
Pre-story instruction and narrative previewing have been shown to support comprehension and narrative performance, particularly for students with language and literacy difficulties (Petersen et al., 2014).
3. Support Story Retell After Reading
After reading a picture book or fiction-based article, the same narrative graphic organizer can be used to support structured story retell.
Students reference the text to:
- Identify story grammar elements
- Sequence key events
- Retell the story using clear organization
Comparing pre-story predictions with the actual story can also support higher-level language skills such as comparison, reflection, and metalinguistic awareness.
Why This Works:
Narrative retell tasks with explicit story grammar support improve both narrative organization and comprehension (Spencer & Slocum, 2010).
4. Create Parallel Stories to Promote Generalization
Once students understand a story’s structure, narrative graphic organizers can be used to create parallel stories.
A parallel story follows the same narrative framework as the original text but changes one or more elements, such as:
- The character
- The setting
- The problem or solution
This structured variation allows students to apply narrative knowledge in a new context while maintaining familiar scaffolding.
Why This Works:
Generalization improves when students practice skills across varied contexts with consistent structural supports, a principle supported across language intervention research (Petersen et al., 2008).
Why Narrative Graphic Organizers Are So Effective
Narrative graphic organizers:
- Reduce cognitive load
- Make abstract story grammar concepts concrete
- Support data collection and progress monitoring
- Work across grade levels and settings
They’re a simple tool with powerful instructional impact—especially when used consistently across personal narratives, literacy-based units, and structured generalization tasks.
Want to Go Deeper?
If you’d like to see these strategies modeled step by step and grab free narrative graphic organizers, check out my on-demand course inside SLP Summit. It’s packed with practical examples you can use right away in your therapy sessions.
👉 Explore the course and access the freebies through SLP Summit.
References
Petersen, D. B., Gillam, S. L., & Gillam, R. B. (2008). Emerging procedures in narrative assessment: The Index of Narrative Microstructure. Topics in Language Disorders, 28(2), 115–130.
Petersen, D. B., Gillam, S. L., Spencer, T. D., & Gillam, R. B. (2014). The effects of literate narrative intervention on children with language impairments. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 57(3), 961–973.
Spencer, T. D., & Slocum, T. A. (2010). The effect of a narrative intervention on story retelling and personal story generation. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 53(2), 356–372.
Transcript
Hello and welcome back to the SLP Now Podcast. I am Marisha. Today we're talking about four simple ways to use a narrative graphic organizer in your therapy sessions. And these strategies work beautifully across multiple grade levels, as long as we're still targeting narrative structure. And these strategies give students a clear structure for organizing their thoughts, whether they're telling a personal narrative or retelling a story they heard from someone else, a picture book or a fiction article. There's lots and lots of options and uses here. So let's jump in to our four ways to use a graphic organizer.
The first step is to use the graphic organizer to structure personal narratives. One of my favorite starting points in intervention is helping students produce personal narratives using the graphic organizer to help them organize something that happened over the weekend or on the playground, whatever is meaningful to the student. Let's make a narrative about it. And we can use the graphic organizer and go through the different elements and ask them like, who was there, when did it happen, where did it happen?
Do some quick pictography to fill in that graphic organizer. And produce a beautiful personal narrative. By using this graphic organizer, it makes personal storytelling much easier. It reduces the overwhelm and gives us really rich language samples.
The second strategy is to use a graphic organizer to build pre-story knowledge when implementing a literacy based therapy unit. Before reading the story, I like to do a book walk and look at the cover of the book and maybe look at a few pages. We don't read it yet. We just scan the book, then we use the organizer to activate pre-story knowledge. After looking at the cover we'll go through our graphic organizer, and we'll ask who do we think the story is about? Where do we think it'll happen?
What do we think the problem will be? We can draw some quick pictures, like little stick drawings, to symbolize what we think will happen in the story. And that is a way to practice building a narrative. Then students can practice telling their version of what they think will happen.
This gets some really meaningful repetitions. It's a great way to make sure that we have adequate story knowledge before we dive in, because if students really struggle with this, I might do some vocabulary instruction, a virtual field trip, or fill out a KWL chart
But using the graphic organizer for pre-story knowledge is really helpful and gives us a great starting point for our unit. The third way we can use the graphic organizer is to support story retell.
After we read the book or the fiction article, we can go through the questions and identify the character, the setting, and all of the different story grammar elements. We can reference the book or article to help create that story retell.
And then that brings us to the fourth and final way we can use a graphic organizer. So that is to create a parallel story. Once we've read the book or the fiction article, we can create a parallel story. A parallel story is following the same narrative structure of the book or article that we just read, but we change some elements.
We might change the character, the setting, the problem, the resolution, whatever it might be. And this supports generalization because students are able to apply that narrative structure, but it's still scaffolded. It's a structure they're familiar with and it helps us bridge that gap to more open-ended storytelling.
My students love creating their parallel stories. They get to infuse their own lives and their own stories into the final parallel story. So it's a really fun activity on all ends. To recap the four strategies we talked about when using a graphic organizer. Use it for personal narratives, pre-story knowledge activation, story retell and parallel stories. If you keep your story grammar graphic organizers, students can use those to compare and contrast. So maybe the pre-story knowledge one, you can compare it to the actual retell. Like what did we guess correctly? Where were we off? That leads to a lot of additional fun language opportunities as well. To wrap things up, a graphic organizer is a very simple tool, but it can be very powerful. And we can use it across a variety of narrative contexts. If you want a deeper dive into narrative interventions to see graphic organizers being used for these different types of narratives, be sure to check out my SLP Summit course.
The replay is available until January 31st. It's packed with practical examples that you can use right away. It also includes some free graphic organizers that you can use in your therapy room for all of the purposes listed in this episode. So that's a wrap for today.
I hope to see you at the SLP Summit. If you go to slpsummit.com, it'll redirect you to the Be the Brightest site and the registration page for Summit. Check out my on-demand course, where you can access the freebies and learn more in-depth strategies than I shared today.
I hope this was super helpful and I'll see you in the next episode.
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