A couple of weeks ago my daughter and I were out shopping and we decided to stop by a new to us store called Ollie's. It was kind of in disrepair, but they had a neat little book section. Of course, as soon as I see books I have to go rummage through to see if I find any gems. And, I did! I found this picture book, Melia and Jo by Billy Aronson and Jennifer Oxley.
I began flipping through the book, noticing all the fun artwork (I'm a picture person) and interesting story line. As I was approaching the end, I knew I was going to have to get this book and use it to help my students understand how important it is for us to see the value in those who think differently than us.
Then I flipped to page 29 and saw the perfect Mentor Sentence:
"By combining Jo's art skills with Melia's science skills, they could create more super-cool stuff together than either could create alone."
What a great lesson for us all to learn! So many times we want to work by ourselves, create our own ideas, and little do we know that the people who may "annoy" us by the way they think or work may actually be the perfect partner for us. They push us to think outside of our little box and bring perspectives that we wouldn't have ever thought of on our own. Needless to say, this book went home with me that day. And, it became the Mentor Text for a week long series of ELAR lessons.
Because of the wonderful lesson Melia learns in this book, I decided to implement lessons about THEME in my week-long series of lessons. I included this worksheet that helps students find the theme of a story by examining the characters' behavior at the beginning of the story, the event that changes their thinking, the lesson they learn from the event, and then their behavior at the end of the story.
Students can choose to type on the slide itself, or teachers can print of a paper copy and have students write on that instead.
This story also led perfectly into studying adjectives for our grammar skill. I created a couple of teaching and practicing lessons and then the students get to begin a fun Drawing and Descriptive Writing project. This project is great for helping our students understand the importance of writing a lot of detail and being descriptive in their writing. I spread the project out over 3 days, but if you have along enough class period, you can complete it in one. *This should be printed out and completed on the worksheets I provide in the packet.
Day 1- the students draw a robot with as much detail as they can think of. They should also be careful to not let others see their drawing!
Day 2- students take their drawing of their robot and write a descriptive paragraph about it. They need to make sure to write everything they possibly can about it, using plenty of adjectives and other descriptive language.
Day 3- Students give their descriptive paragraph to another student and that student then has to draw their robot based on the descriptions in the paragraph. When they are finished they should compare the two drawings and discuss what and why they may be different. This is such a fun writing project. My students always enjoy it!
The other writing skills I included in this packet was the one minute write. I love this writing strategy because it helps my writers who get overwhelmed with a large blank page. Usually I have my students complete the one minute write in their composition journals. We draw a line when we are finished, and their goal for the next one is to write a little more than the last time. Our focus for these one minute writes is describing the pictures. Once again, working on those adjectives and description.
To wrap up our learning for the week, I created a Google Forms Quiz with questions covering theme, adjectives, and the mentor sentence for the week. You can find the all inclusive, week-long packet here
