Our class has been exploring the amazing book “The One and Only Ivan” by Katherine Applegate. This book is a fantastic resource to use when exploring reading strategies, themes and important messages. Sometimes these messages are implied, and therefore we have been focusing on inferencing as a strategy to better understand characters thoughts and feelings, or construct meaning. Tomorrow a very important character will be introduced. Students will be reading the chapters “change” and “guessing” and then make inferences based on what they read and the connections they can make to their prior knowledge.
Change
Stella is the first to write the change, but soon we all feel it.
A new animal is coming to the Big Top Mall.
How do we know this? Because we listen, we watch, and most of all, we sniff the air.
Humans always smell odd when change is in the air.
Like rotten meat, with a hint of papaya.
How does Stella feel about a baby elephant coming to the Big Top Mall?
Use evidence from the text and your own ideas to support your inference.
Learning goal: we are learning to infer characters thoughts and feelings.
Success criteria
1- limited ability 2- some ability 3- considerable ability 4- above and beyond expectation!
Self Teacher Success Criteria
__I have stated how the character might be feeling.
__I have used evidence from the text or my own ideas to support my understanding
of how the character is feeling.
__I can explain how my evidence and my ideas support my understanding of how
the character is feeling.
__My thinking is organized and clearly presented to my audience.
