Tag: f6

Use punctuation to enhance phrasing and prosody (end marks, commas, etc).

Book of the Week: Er-lang and the Suns

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!

Er-lang and the Suns, Retold by Tony Guo and Euphine Cheung

Er-lang and the Suns: A Tale from China is a text from the SFA Roots program. There should be one master copy of the Roots lesson plans in the bookroom. There are check for understanding questions on post-its throughout at least one of the three teacher copies.

This is an origin story covering how the Earth finally got reprieve from its seven suns that shone nonstop. There are plenty of other origin stories to compare and contrast with. As always, pre-read these texts before sharing them with students, as they are appropriate for different ages.

The end of the book contains a brief history of China and the Han people.

As mentioned earlier, there are three copies of this book if you want to use them as a grade-level team mentor text.

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

  • Make a picture or mental image. At the end of the book, there’s a brief passage that talks about how the illustrations were designed to match the tone of the story. Ask students to pick and sketch 5-7 of the most important images that they think are critical to telling the story. To take this a step further, then have them write a brief caption for each picture. Huzzah! They’ve now also used the strategy of…
  • Retell the story. See above.
  • Compare and contrast within and between text. See above for plenty of other origin stories. Perhaps students could select their favorite and document the similarities and differences with Er-lang and the Suns.

 

 

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: If You Are a Hunter of Fossils

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 extra ideas or additions!

If You Are a Hunter of Fossils, by Byrd Baylor

Well, this book set off quite a bit of pondering on my part. Originally published in 1980, much has happened in the world of dinosaurs since this was created. So at what point does a nonfiction book do more harm than good in a library? You may have seen me tackle this question earlier this month.

I attempted to find a recording of the Reading Rainbow episode this was featured on. Instead:

You can SEE what I searched for! Did Reading Rainbow seriously Rickroll me???

Anyway. There are a billion and a half dinosaur links and lessons and related books I could suggest to you. So I’ll just share two of my favorites.

Sue at The Field Museum in Chicago. Sue, in my mind, is, for kids, the reason museums were made. The whole reason students clamor to go on a field trip. Sue is a beautiful, huge, wonderful, magnificent specimen that every scientifically-inclined human on Earth should go see. I haven’t met her yet. But I will.

 

 

Dinosaur National Monument. I visited the monument in 2004 reporting on the Colorado River Trips program. When you wake up in the morning, you wonder how anyone got any dinosaur-digging done because the whole area is so breathtaking.

Also, if you’d like to search for fossils in Washington State, here’s how. I priced out a Wildwood trip to Stonerose Interpretive Center, but it’s obviously out of our price range. Like, way way way out of our price range. Boo.

Anyway. Baylor’s story is a lovely piece of poetry-ish prose that celebrates the spirit of exploration and discovery. The art is OK, and it hold up well to more than thirty years of age. So I think it will stay in our library for now — it’s still absolutely relevant. (Although some new research points to Pteranodon being more bird-like than bat-like)

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

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: Olly and Me

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!

Olly and Me, by Shirley Hughes

This book is out of print, but we do have two copies in the mentor text bag in the bookroom. Although it looks like a regular children’s book (perhaps in the style of Eve Bunting), it’s actually a book of poetry. If you’ve been searching for a solid collection of free verse poetry, you’ve found it.

The author, Shirley Hughes, is apparently a household name across the pond in England. Her book Dogger was featured as The Guardian’s Classic of the Month in 2004.

The Guardian also posted a lengthy interview with Ms. Hughes in 2009, the best quote from which I believe is, “The idea that pictures are sternly removed from you as soon as you learn to read is a truly terrible one.”

I’d love to use this book to bridge from personal narrative writing into poetry, especially helping students realize the ideas they’ve generated for narrative can be transfered to another writing form.

One poem features a visit to the Natural History Museum. Poetry would be SUCH a neat way to reflect on a field trip!

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

Accuracy

  • Use beginning and ending sounds. The poem “Happy Birthday, Dear Mom” features a goodly collection of B words, without being a ridiculous tongue twister. In primary grades, this could be a good authentic text to pull /b/ sounds from.

Fluency

  • Voracious Reading. Voracious readers choose books written by both US and foreign authors. It could be worthwhile to talk about how a British accent might change the rhythm of poetry — sometimes rhyming words won’t rhyme if you say them in a standard Midwestern American accent. Many of our students have accents as well. How do our individual accents impact our oral and silent reading? This might even be an entry point into examining whether students are subvocalizing when they read silently.
  • Use punctuation to enhance phrasing and prosody. I’m not gonna lie, I still really struggle with figuring out how to read free verse poetry out loud. Do I stop at the end of the line? This runs counter to what we teach younger readers when they’re reading blocks of prose text. Or do I stop at the punctuation marks? What if there are no punctuation marks? If you need more practice like I do, The Writer’s Almanac often features non-rhyming poetry in its daily broadcast. Click on the “Listen” link, then fast forward to the end of the recording, which is when Garrison Keillor reads a poem out loud.

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!

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: The Three Billy Goats Gruff

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. Feel free to use anything you find useful, but comments are always appreciated!

The Three Billy Goats Gruff, by Paul Galdone

We talk a lot about filling in background knowledge of our high-poverty and ELL students. Lucky for us, we have a whole bunch of Paul Galdone’s traditional stories in our bookroom. I’ve seen The Three Billy Goats Gruff, obviously (it’s currently in the bucket of former SFA Roots books), The Little Red Hen, The Three Bears, and The Gingerbread Man. Combine this with all the James Marshall fairy tale books we have, and we’ve got a pretty solid collection. You might also want to talk with our Kindergarten team, as I know a few teachers did a fairy tale unit last year.

You can learn more about Galdone here, in a neat Seattle Times profile. Information on the Austrian-born artist and his work can also be found here, here, and here. You know I’m more than wary about Wikipedia, but I’m perplexed that I can’t find any “official” biographies. Holy COW, look at all the books he illustrated (scroll down to the bottom).

1958 book review in the St. Petersburg Times

Children’s book historian Leonard S. Marcus had this to say about Galdone’s works: “Knowing that copies of his books were bound for use in preschool and elementary school classrooms and public libraries, he planned his illustrations with the child in the last row at story hour in mind.” I love learning the thinking behind books, particularly picture books, which are so often dismissed by grown-ups as easy to write. You can see his illustration style in this sample of The Little Red Hen.

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

Comprehension

  • Use prior knowledge to connect with text. This goes along with asking questions, below. Ask (or chart) what traditional stories students have heard or seen. This will help you gauge familiarity with patterns such as the rule of three, etc.
  • Ask questions throughout the reading process. Before: What are some characteristics of traditional or enduring stories? During: What patterns do you notice in the structure of the story? Does it remind you of any other children’s stories? After: Why do you think the author says the troll was “as mean as he was ugy”? Do you often notice that the evil characters are ugly while the heroes are pretty or handsome? Why do you think many authors do this?

Fluency

  • Use punctuation to enhance phrasing and prosody. For primary students, talk about the all-caps words and the different tones the billy goats and troll might use. This would be a great shared reading opportunity to start with, because everybody will probably wind up sounding pretty silly. For older students, you could contrast the all-caps approach of conveying mood with more modern books like Geronimo Stilton, which uses multicolored, crazily-shaped text. How does technology impact the way books are written, published, and ultimately interpreted? How do these interpretations change over time?
Speaking of different interpretations of the Three Billy Goats, this is a tremendous resource.
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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