The last few weeks have been so crazy for me with the National Boards due date approaching quickly. I spend multiple hours everyday editing and rewriting entries. I can't wait to mail that pretty little box next month. Since I have had NO time to plan, I am grateful that I am able to pull out my Pieces of Learning novel guides and teach great units.
My teamie recently introduced me to a great book called Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. I just adore this book! It has wonderful imagery and is great for teaching inferential skills. Luckily, I was able to find a novel guide for this book on the Pieces of Learning website. One of the activities my students did yesterday was write poems about the characters. I was so impressed at how much they were able to tell me about the characters in their poems.

Since it's no secret how much I love Pieces of Learning, I contacted them and asked if they be willing to host a giveaway and since they are so supportive of teachers they agreed! Pieces of Learning is going to give a novel guide away to TEN different readers, all you have to do to be entered in this drawing is visit their website and decide which novel guide you would like to have. Then, come back to my blog and leave a comment with the name of the novel guide you would like and your email address. Next Thursday, I will use the random generator to select ten lucky readers. The great thing about these novel guides is you can download them automatically.

This week I have started a Fudge-A-Mania novel study with my gifted reading students. Today was our first day and I am so excited at how it went. I purchased my Literature Guide from Pieces of Learning and it came with everything I needed to get started. The one thing I really liked about this literature guide as appose to some of the others that I have purchased is that the activities included were things I had learned about in my graduate program. Whenever I create a lesson, I always try to include activities that are researched based.

Before I began the lesson I made each of my students a folder to hold all of their supplies for this novel study. I also made each student a journal so that they could have a place to do their reader's response activities in. My students were thrilled when I showed them their journals.

Today I had the students work with a partner to do the first activity. The guide included a sheet with 40 or so words that the students would see once they began reading. We said these words out loud together and then the students worked together to cut apart the words and place them into groups. The way they grouped the words were up to them. The only rule was that each group must have at least three words in it. Then the students created labels for the groups they made. I was so impressed at how the students had chose to group the words.

Tomorrow I am going to have students try to look at all of their groups and see if there are any groups that can be combined.