Teachable Texts

114. The Gold Coin by Alma Flor Ada

October 18, 2009 at 7:14 pm Leave a comment

Retell: A thief discovers a woman who claims to be the “richest person in the world.”  He ransacks her hut but fails to find her gold.  He goes on a quest to find the woman and her gold. What he finds instead are people who teach him that being rich has little to do with gold.

Topics: gold, greed, thieves, kindness, hard work, acceptance

Units of Study: Character, Social Issues, Talking and Writing about Texts

Tribes: mutual respect

Reading Skills: prediction, interpretation, inference, empathy

Writing Skills: incorporating the rule of three

My Thoughts: I first discovered this story when I went to a Great Books training years ago.  I’ve since used it a few times during the Character unit.  It is a great text for examining how people can change because of their relationships with other people.  It’s a great text to use when you are launching whole class conversation during and after read alouds.

Entry filed under: Female Authors, Latino Authors, Picture Books. Tags: acceptance, character, empathy, gold, greed, hard work, inference, interpretation, kindness, mutual respect, prediction, rule of three, social issues, talking and writing about texts, thieves.