Happy October friends! I’m on Fall Break this week, but school
is never far from my brain! I’m planning for next week and wanted
to show you some of the things we’ll be up to! We’ll be focusing on
nocturnal animals through the end of the month but most of all, October means Stellaluna!
We’ll be reading this teacher’s dream of a book and using my Stellaluna Character and Book Study.
I love this sweet story and it lends itself so perfectly to going deep within the text and
addresses so many of our standards!
As we work with Stellaluna, we spend time analyzing the characters, their differing
points of view, and how they respond to events and change
throughout the story. These are two of the charts we made
last year.
As we read, we stop to describe Stellaluna during each part
of the story. We record adjectives in this combo bubble and flow map that my kids call a “flubble map”.
Students then give evidence and events to support their adjectives choices.
One of the reasons I love this book so much is that is each of the
characters has a very distinct point of view.
I made blank student versions of both of these which I’ll project
on my white board. We’ll start this whole group and then the kids
complete them during literacy centers. My class is familiar with
charting how a character changes then finding proof with
an organizer like this since we’ve done this with several other books.
I like analyzing this way whole group so that students are already
thinking pretty deeply about the story by the time we move
into centers. It’s a great way to get that academic conversation
started and model all of the vocabulary you want them to be using!
During our literacy centers students buddy read, then do a “book talk” with
these discussion cards.
We’ll use these story sticks to practice fluency,
reading with expression, and some Stellaluna silliness while
reading in the different character’s voices.
Here’s a peek at one of our Stellaluna literacy centers.
We’ll be reviewing the two sounds of C and there are
just so many great hard/soft c words to use in this book!
To give my students added practice with retelling and
sequencing I added this activity to sequence story events.
We’ll be working with story vocabulary to define, compare and make
text to self connections.
We summarize the story to include in our character booklets using
Somebody, Wanted, But, Then, So.
You can download a copy of this Summarize Stellaluna page {HERE}
As a culminating project, we’ll be making Stellaluna Character Study
booklets. Students describe the story’s events and how Stellaluna
responds.They also write about how she feels differently than
the birds about sleeping, flying at night, and eating bugs!
These are just a few of our Stellaluna activities. If you’d like to do
these with your class click {HERE} to see all the goodies
included in the file. Best part? It even includes a detailed pacing
guide and 2 week lesson plan!
I just posted a pack of Stellaluna SMARTboard games
with mini-lessons to work further with story vocabulary,
with mini-lessons to work further with story vocabulary,
sequencing events, fact/opinion, the two sounds of C,
and replacing nouns with pronouns.
I use these as a literacy stations but they’d be great whole group
or with your interventions and English language learners too.
Along with the 5 games I’ve included premade templates
so you can easily differentiate and tailor the text
to your students’ abilities.
Read more about how I use the book
Stellaluna in this post
Stellaluna: Turning Readers Into Comprehenders
Need help finding these resources?
Find the Stellaluna book with my Amazon affiliate link.
Find the Stellaluna book study in my shop.
Find the SMARTBoard Activities in my shop.
Happy teaching friends!
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Yes!! It's definitely one of my favorites, Alison!
I'm so glad they like it Stephanie! It is such a fun book for hitting all of those reading literature standards and my kids always feel such a connection to Stellaluna!
What great activities! Stellaluna really is a fantastic book!
Alison
Teaching Maths with Meaning
We are doing this amazing unit this week and my students are LOVING it!!!
Love your anchor charts! 🙂