Knowing and understanding the elements of a story helps students with their comprehension of what is taking place in the book or novel. When students apply their knowledge of story elements of characters, setting, problems, events, and solutions, they become more involved in the story and take a greater interest in details. In this lesson, students use a six-paneled comic strip to create a story map, summarizing a book or story that they've read either as a class or independently. The story strips also provide a way to assess student's understanding of important events and elements in a novel. Although this lesson plan uses Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are as an example to model the process of creating the story map comic strips, any book students have explored recently that demonstrates the elements of character, setting, problem, events, and solutions will work. Although this resource has been identified byreadwritethnk or 3-5th grades, ORCs understanding of the rigor of the Common Core standards shows it as appropriate for 1st grade. A nonessential link (Reading Buddies) is no longer functional. (author/ncl/jg)