Comparing and Contrasting Stories with Venn Diagrams

Venn diagrams are a very useful tool to help kids learn to compare and contrast. Since we're in our fairytale themed week  we've been reading lots of stories! We've got a book called Once Upon a Time with some great versions of many popular tales that we've been sticking to for this week, but we've also got some Disney books with collections of some tales as well. I wanted my daughter to see that there can be multiple versions of one story so we read both books version of "The Little Mermaid."

After we finished reading I decided that we should make a venn diagram so we could list out the differences and similarities together. Yes, Charlie is only two years old but it's very important for kids to get used to seeing that things are written out a lot in life. It helps with literacy skills overall, expanding vocabulary, spelling, sight word recognition, and like I said just getting used to the fact that we live in a print-rich environment. So, we did this on our big dry erase board.

Note: Not claiming that my handwriting was perfect, as I was writing pretty quickly.

It was actually a fun thing to do as well as very educational. I asked my daughter provoking questions about the stories to get her thinking. I explained how when you list something on one side of the venn diagram it's good to list something similar that's different/the opposite on the other side. And of course how the things that are in the same in both cases goes in the middle. Doing this also helps with reading comprehension skills. You might be surprised at how much your little one will remember from stories you read to them.