More on The Stranger

My original post from 2010: My two favorite Van Allburg books are The Stranger and The Sweetest Fig. The Stranger is a great book to use when teaching inferring. You can see from my poster that I start with: I think the stranger is.... and Here are the clues (details) that helped me:  I put a sticky over the answer. As we read the book I had the children make their thinking visible on post it notes and then stick them to the page.We developed the list on the anchor chart together. Many children are able to understand that something unusual or magical is happening but they don't have the background knowledge to come up with the name Jack Frost.
            This year as I was reading The Stranger to my class I started thinking how much our questions  lead us to understanding who the stranger really is. I produced this new anchor chart with the 4th graders.  I combined parts of the text with the post it notes where the children made their thinking visible. Here are some pictures: