Jan Brett Author Study

November is one of my favorite months to teach because of Election Day, Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving. However, after Thanksgiving comes one of my favorite units to teach.  I absolutely love Jan Brett.  She is an amazing author and illustrator.  Each year I have taught I have done an author study using some of her books as a whole class project.

I take about two weeks to compete the author study and try to read one book each day.  After we have read five of the books I have my students write a summary for one of the books with their table group.  There is a graphic organizer in their packet to help organize their thoughts and then I give them chart paper and a marker to write their group's final draft.

After the summaries, I have the students do a character analysis.  They choose one character from one of the books and draw a picture of him/her in the middle.  They then write different things about the character around the outside of the picture.

The next big thing that I do is read The Mitten by Jan Brett and then read The Mitten by Alvin Tresselt and the students compare and contrast the two stories.  Once we have read both stories I allow the students to write their own mitten stories.  I cut out large mittens from construction paper and have the students decorate them as the cover to their stories.

The last thing we do is make a graph of our favorite Jan Brett books as a class.  I choose five of the books and have the students pick their favorite.

The mitten stories, summaries, and graph all go into the hallway as a display for the month of December. (I seem to have never taken a picture of this display so I will try to do that and update this post in the next few weeks.)

I have made a packet that goes with the author study that can be found by clicking here!

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Digital Literature Circles

Even though I am not teaching reading this year, I am looking through many of my resources on Google Drive and thinking about how they can be adapted to fit digital learning.

This Google Presentation has two options for you to choose from. You can use the presentation for the entire book club/literature circle book. (I set up 4 meetings for this option) You can also choose to use a different presentation for each time the students meet. I have a notes page in the beginning of the presentation that tells you which slides to delete based on the option you choose that will not mess up the links.

I use 5 roles in my literature circles: Summarizer, Questioner, Illustrator, Connector, and Word Wizard.

There are slides for each role to complete before the day that students will meet. There are also slides included that explain each role in the literature circle and a few resources that may help them complete the slide.

I suggest using Zoom or Google Meet to host the literature circle meetings. One person can share their screen to project the slides that were completed as each student shares in the literature circle.

Click on one of the images above or go to my RELA Resources page to access the presentation.

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Maniac Magee Project Choice Board

In my previous blog post I mentioned that my students will complete a project from the choice board after finishing the novel, Maniac Magee. All of these projects will use some type of digital tool that the students will then be able to share with others, as well as, add to their digital portfolio for the novel study.

Click on the image above to visit the choice board.

Novel Study Digital Portfolio

We may have just finished our Maniac Magee novel study at the end of Quarter 3, but after learning more about Hyperdocs a couple of weekends agos I decided I wanted to try out something new while it was all fresh in my brain.

I used Google Slides and Google Sites (among other Google Suite apps) to create a completely digital novel study for Maniac Magee using my county's reading curriculum. While it took a decent amount of time to put everything together and make sure that everything was hyperlinked to the correct link, next year when this unit comes up I will be good to go!

To set it up, I started with a Google Slides presentation. The first few slides explain how the students should set up their Google Site. The site will be used to create their digital portfolio of all of their assignments. Next, each slide in the presentation represents a different day the students will work on the novel. Each day has a set of chapters the students are to read, information they need to review or learn (usually linked to an anchor chart), sometimes an assignment for them to complete (for example, completing a graphic organizer where the students will use the text to find evidence of how two characters are similar), and then a Google Form where the students will complete their routine writing assignment for that set of chapters. The one slide has all of the directions and hyperlinks to everything the student needs. I also included a link to another Google Slide presentation that has tier 3 vocabulary for each set of chapters.

Here is an image of what a slide may look like:

The icons at the top of the slide let the students know which apps they will use each day.

At the end of the unit, the students will complete a project from the choice board:

After their project is completed and uploaded to their Google Site, then the students will have a finished digital portfolio on Google Sites that they can share with parents, grandparents, teachers, classmates, etc.. This will really allow them to take ownership and be proud of their work.