Tag: c8

Predict what will happen, use text to confirm.

Book of the Week: I Wonder… About the Sky

 

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

I Wonder… About the Sky, by Enid Field

This is an older book, and it seems like it’s out of print, but our bookroom has a copy, so let’s go with it. I think it can anchor a couple of pretty critical thinking skills. Consider pairing it with one of these resources:

Wonderopolis. The name pretty much speaks for itself.

I Wonder Why… New series on our local NPR station.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

  • Ask questions throughout the reading process. This is pretty self-explanatory. The entire book starts with “I wonder…” and then some element about the sky or weather. For example: 
  • Predict what will happen, use text to confirm. I notice that often when I make KWL charts with my students, we neglect to follow up on them. (whoops) Consider copying a few of the pages, posting them around the classroom (or the hallway — the photographs are pretty neat), then letting students add answers or new learning as they find them.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Book of the Week: Rachel Parker, Kindergarten Show-Off

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

Rachel Parker, Kindergarten Show-Off, by Ann Martin

Chances are, if you are of a certain age, Ann M. Martin means Baby-Sitters Club. Although she ended the series in 2000, she actually remains pretty active online, posting updates every few months to her Scholastic site. The biography posted there says she’s currently interested in writing books set in the 1960s.

If you’re interested in reading gearing-up-for-kindergarten books, you might want to touch base with Sarah Stock, because I know she’s been reading up on them lately. Plenty of great ones exist, but not many talk about someone moving to the class in the middle of kindergarten.

Conversely, plenty of books about students moving deal with the acquisition of new friends (including this year’s Battle of the Books novel Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls: Moving Day), but it’s a bit more rare to find one that looks at it through the lens of shifting classroom dynamics because of the addition of a new personality.

Last I checked with Bev, our transient rate has decreased to somewhere around 25-30 percent, but new class members is something bunches of our students can relate to.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

Comprehension

  • Predict what will happen, use text to confirm. Older students who may be familiar with the basic “Happy about new kid, disappointed about new kid, BFFs with new kid” structure could be encouraged to go deeper in their predictions. What will their fall-out look like? How will the reconcile? How will they move forward with their friendship? How will their relationship impact the class at large?
  • Infer and support with evidence. Neither Rachel nor Olivia admit that they’re jealous of each others’ talents and home lives, but their actions and dialogue reveal they feel otherwise. This might also be a good point to talk about a reliable narrator — how do we know that some of what Olivia says is actually exaggerated or incomplete?

 

Fluency

  • Use punctuation to enhance phrasing and prosidy. This is one of those rare picture books where there’s actually paragraph indentation, especially indents due to dialogue. It’d be useful to point this out during a shared reading passage, or to use a passage in a writing workshop conversation about conventions.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Book of the Week: There’s an Alligator Under My Bed

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom and offer lesson plan suggestions.

There’s an Alligator Under my Bed, by Mercer Mayer

This book is one of the old SFA Roots listening comprehension texts, and as such, there are three copies available! Perfect for collaborative lesson planning with your teammates!

In There’s an Alligator Under my Bed, a young boy is fully cognizant of the reptile hanging out below his mattress, despite the fact that he can’t get his parents to believe him. He takes matters into his own hands to solve the problem.

You can watch Mr. Mayer himself read the book in this video:

Boy, would a Mercer Mayer author study be awesome. Especially for folks working on a writing unit on realistic fiction or personal narrative (I’m thinking of the Little Critter books, not There’s an Alligator Under my Bed :)). Also, did you know that Mercer Mayer does non-picture book art too?

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggestions:

Comprehension

  • Predict what will happen, use text to confirm. The surprise ending of this book would be fun to predict then disprove with explanations from the text.
  • Summarize text, include sequence of main events. This simple story would be perfect for teaching the Somebody-Wanted-But-So framework.
  • Compare and contrast within and between text. Why not compare and contrast this book with There’s a Nightmare in my Closet? Video available here:

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Book of the Week: Stickeen

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions.

Stickeen, by John Muir, as retold by Donnell Rubay

John Muir was a pretty neat guy. This book is told as narrative nonfiction, from John Muir’s point of view. I believe it’s taken right from his journals, but retold by Rubay. This would make an excellent mentor text for a biography unit, particularly for talking about what makes a story narrative nonfiction. (It’s told in such a way that it has a plot, just like a fiction story.)

If your students are working on biographies, there are a TON of great biographies at many different levels in the Benchmark series. Log in to www.librarything.com and look for the tag of “biographies.”

There are also several good book titles at the back of the book for further reading.

John Muir started the Sierra Club, which has a bunch of biographical information at its website.

You can learn more about Muir’s hometown of Dunbar, in Scotland, here. If you want pictures of Dunbar, contact me and let me know. It was one of my favorite places that I visited in Scotland.

Stickeen comes with a pretty high-level lesson about inferences, figurative language, and similes. Please leave this lesson in the book bag, as it is the master copy. The lesson suggests pairing the book with Old Yeller or Where the Red Fern Grows. Both of those books are former SFA books, so 4th and 5th teachers should have 4-5 copies in each classroom if you wanted to use them in a shared reading.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggestions:

Comprehension

  • Predict what will happen; use text to confirm. It would be interesting to see if students think that Stickeen will start out being John Muir’s best friend — so many books are written with canine pals, that this might be the case. If they do think they will start off with a strong bond, question them throughout the text as to how their prediction might shift or change.
  • Recognize literary elements (plot, setting, theme). As mentioned above, because this is a narrative nonfiction, it can still be used to discuss the importance of plot and setting. Additionally, the included lesson plan touches on the theme of determination.

Fluency

  • Adjust and apply different reading rates to match text. Although students are often advised to read fact-heavy nonfiction books in second gear (1st gear: memorizing, 2nd gear: absorbing facts, 3rd gear: reading as fast as one would speak, 4th gear: skimming), you could talk with your students about why it matches the narrative flow of the book to read it in 3rd gear, but to make sure to stop frequently to check for understanding.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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