Abstract
This article explores children's notions of what stories and reports are, how they can be organized, and when to use them as revealed in the stories and reports they wrote or recalled, and in their responses to questions about each. There were 67 high achieving children in grades 3,6 and 9 who read and wrote similar kinds of stories and reports. This permitted comparison of ways in which they organized their knowledge across genre (story and report) and domain (reading and writing). Findings indicate the following: (1) Children have strongly differentiated notions of stories and reports and structure stories and reports in different ways from early on; (2) They use these structures in the pieces they read and retell as well as in the pieces they write; (3) Both stories and reports grow in complexity along a variety of measures; and (4) Both stories and reports show increased student control of genre-related organizational structures.