Patricia Polacco

I love stories that show how a character changes. Mrs. Mack by Patricia Polacco is a great example of this. I got the idea for this lesson from a great blog: Get In The Fold http://getinthefold.blogspot.com/2011/11/why-we-love-patricia-polacco.html I had the 4th and 5th graders make the foldables prior to reading the book. We read up to page 14 and then completed the questions on the left side of the foldable:

• What did Patricia do?
• What did Patricia think or feel?
• How did others respond to her?

• How did she look?

After we finished the story we answered the same questions on the other side of the foldable.

The Get in the Fold blog has much better pictures that I do of what the inside looks like. After finishing the left and right sides of the foldable we worked on the inside sheet:

It includes three major events from the story and how Patricia reacted and how others responded. I narrowed down the major events in the story and put them on the above poster. This sheet gets tucked inside the foldable. This was a great activity for that week before Christmas. After we finished them I had the kids decorate the covers. Many of the students got interested in my collection of  Patricia Polacco books after reading Mrs. Mack. Christine

My Side of the Mountain

We have been using My Side of the Mountain as a mentor text for our WEX writing assignments. In this lesson the students needed to find text based evidence of Sam's character traits.

Those super large stickers came from http://www.exclrecycles.org/donate.html
Each teacher in our school got a free one year membership to Extras For Creative Learning from the EDIC. Its a store filled with all kinds of misc. school supplies and materials for art projects. I got piles of those stickers and thought long and hard about how to use them. Each group completed one sticker by adding a character trait and the text based evidence from various parts of the novel. Then  we posted them on our anchor chart. If you can think of any other great ways to use all those stickers, let me know!

Our next lesson involved producing a timeline for the book. Chapter one is confusing for the reader because it takes place in the middle of the story. The journal actually begins in chapter 2. The timeline helped the students to determine importance. They could only list 10 events. This caused much discussion over which events where the most important and why.Christine

Whole Brain Teaching: Grade 1 Classroom

This is for Meghan. Christine