Today during our enrichment time I met with my novel study group to begin chapter one of Fudge-A-Mania. One thing I love about this novel guide is that it does a great job of activating prior knowledge before teaching any concepts. Today the students completed two sentence starters before beginning chapter one. The first sentence starter was, "When a family member gets married..." and the second one was, "One reason to pretend to faint...".
 I was impressed at how these simple sentence starters really got students thinking about their own life. One of the students wrote "When a family member gets married I go to their house that day and stay there until the wedding." This student has clearly recalled a time that she was either in a wedding or someone in her immediate family had just gotten married.
 

     After we shared the sentence starters, I had the students read chapter one independently. They were so excited to begin reading. It was like it was Christmas. I think that this unit has really helped build interest in the story.