I LOVE books!

For the past two weeks my class has been enthralled in some amazing books! We have been working hard on comparing and contrasting different elements of text. I thought I would share some of the books we have been using and what we have been using them for. (Some of these I may have posted about before)

We used this book to compare and contrast character dialogue. Before we even charted using a simple t-chart, I read the book. Then we went back through noting the dialogue. They were shocked to realize that one of the characters didn't say a thing in the beginning and middle...but when he did speak it was important and the climax of the story!

This book is SO powerful! I used it to talk about how setting can affect and change a character, also how a character changes, we compared and contrasted how she felt in the beginning versus the end.

I know that I talked about this next book before, but I love it...and so do the students! There is so much to discuss about in this book. We first used it to compare and contrast the two characters.

We then read Teammates and compared the two characters. The next day we compared and contrasted the two stories (Pink and Say with Teammates)...it was AMAZING some of the things the students came up with: "they are both battling the same thing even though they are decades apart", "the both wore uniforms". Great discussions!!!

We then compared and contrasted stories written by the same author (how the story itself was structured, written, etc.)

As we moved on we started a Character unit. I will share my Reading notebook and classroom focus/topic poster soon! But I wanted to share the students' favorite book, they couldn't stop talking about this one and the character traits that they discussed were great.

ENJOY these great mentor texts!