Good morning everyone! We just wanted to take a quick minute to share two highly engaging activities our students did after reading the narrative poem, Charlie McButton Loses Power by Suzanne Collins. The first activity comes from junior high teacher Christine Boardman-Moen's book, BetterThan Book Reports. This book is filled with timeless activities that deepen students' reading experiences. We highly recommend checking out this book. We have used many of the activities in this book over the years.
The activity we chose is called The Story Tree. This activity helped the students review the literary elements of protagonist, setting, conflict, solution, and resolution, as well as allow students to reflect on their own opinion about the story. We believe the Story Tree also met the CCSS RL3.5 because students must refer to parts of the poem and describe how each successive part builds on earlier parts. Our students loved the challenge of describing each part of the poem with a given amount of words. They especially loved typing their work and putting a watermark behind it. We were pleased with the amount of conversation this activity promoted, as well as the excited energy it ignited within the students.
The second activity came from the Get Your Teach On conference. It involved the students creating a fake text message conversation using the website iFake Text Message. This activity addressed the CCSS RL3.3 because students had to identify the protagonist's (Charlie McButton) traits and feelings and explain how his actions contributed to the sequence of events.
This activity grabbed our students' attention immediately because text messaging is a part of their every day life.They couldn't wait to get started. They were charged with the challenge of having a conversation with one of their friends about some of Charlie's character traits. In that conversation, the students were required to support those traits with evidence from the poem. This was a challenge because it wasn't just straight forward- find the trait and find the evidence. That in itself requires higher level thinking. This upped the ante because they had to turn it into a conversation. Their conversation had to use all types of sentences and interjections to make it flow.
All of us loved this activity so much, we decided to use it with our next Common Core Standard, RL3.6, which is on perspective. We will share that with you next time.
Stay warm over this Martin Luther King holiday weekend. It is two degrees here in Chicago, and we are getting ready to get hit with snow!
Kim and Anne
