Nonfiction Picture Book Wednesday-October 8, 2014

My Friend Alyson Beecher at Kid Lit Frenzy hosts a weekly link up to share Nonfiction Picture Books. Please visit her amazing website. 

Agate: What Good is a Moose? 
by Joy Morgan Dey
Illustrated by 
Nikki Johnson
Published 2007 by Lake Superior Post Cities Inc. 
Picture Book
32 Pages
Obtained from public library

Summary from Goodreads 
Agate is a moose with low self-esteem. He feels inadequate and plain, like an ugly brown rock, especially when he compares himself to his beautiful friends who are named after birthstones. These friend help Agate to see that just like his namesake, true beauty lies within. Stunning original watercolors, a witty, positive message about self image plus bonus pages with birthstone and agate facts. Perfect for reading aloud.

My Thoughts

Although this book is categorized as fiction, I am sharing it here on Nonfiction Picture Book Wednesday because it is filled with facts about the animals. 

I like how each animal is named after a birthstone and beautifully painted using the respective watercolors. The message is not new, but one that bears repeating with children: everyone is unique and should be valued for their own talents and gifts. The author weaves in facts that work very naturally with the story. She does not shy away from using more complicated vocabulary, within the rhyming, poetic text, such as disjointed, scarcely, malcontented and self-conscious making this book a perfect read aloud for ages 5-10. Along with enjoying the story, there are many curricular connections that can be made.

Use this book...

*as part of a poetry unit. 

*as a read aloud during a unit about animals.

*early in the year to build community-everyone is unique. 

*as a mentor text for context clues. 

*as a mentor text for facts vs. opinions. 

*as a mentor text for summarizing-somebody, wanted, but, so, then.

Sharing an Idea- Teaching About Silent Letters

My 4th grade curriculum map tells me that I must teach about spelling words with silent letters. Yes, we do this all the time in our writing since silent letters are everywhere, but I wanted to do a couple of more direct lessons.  I didn't want to spend a lot of time and I wanted to keep it text-based as much as possible.  I also thought it might be a good way to touch upon some other skills such as predicting and summarizing. 

As we do with many skills and concepts, we started with a mentor text. 

After brainstorming a few words with silent letters, I read the first half of Silent Letters, Loud and Clear. In this book the children in the classroom complain about how difficult spelling can be because of silent letters. So they write an email to the editor of the newspaper to complain.  The silent letters' feelings are hurt and they decide to leave the email before the student presses send. 

I stopped halfway through and to asked the students to make some predictions about what might happen next. They quickly jotted these down on their white boards then discuss their thoughts.  Most of them predicted that the email would not make sense.

The next day we finished the story (it also contains a lot of idioms and other figurative language so we discussed those). 

Then we used the "somebody, wanted, but, so, then" framework for summarizing fiction, again using our whiteboards. 

On the third and final day, the students took the silent letters out of a message I had written to them. They were surprised by how many silent letters there were.   

Lastly, the students had some fun writing short messages, leaving out the silent letters, and showing them to each other. It was fun to watch them try to read each other's writing and laughing about the misspellings. 

We ended with a quick reflection.