Posts tagged ‘freedom’
144. Just Us Women by Jeanette Caines
Retell: A niece describes her annual road trip with her favorite aunt.
Topics: road trips, family, freedom, women, bonding
Units of Study: Talking and Writing About Texts
Tribes: mutual respect
Habits of Mind: applying past knowledge to new situations, thinking flexibly
Reading Skills: inference, interpretation
My Thoughts: I’m beginning a new unit this week–a unit devoted to strengthening my students inference and interpretation skills. I’m looking for short and engaging texts to read aloud. This is a great text for modeling how readers can infer a lot of information about a character/relationship from a simple line of text.
118. Hawk, I’m Your Brother by Byrd Baylor
Retell: Rudy Soto yearns to fly. He climbs up a cliff and captures a young hawk in the hope that he will be able to become brothers with the hawk and thus have a sense of what it means to fly. Eventually he sets the hawk free and is forever changed.
Topics: hawks, dreams, flying, keeping pets, freedom
Units of Study: Talking and Writing About Texts, Social Issues
Tribes: mutual respect
Reading Skills: questioning, inference, interpretation, synthesis
Writing Skills: using alliteration
My Thoughts: Each year the issue of whether or not to get a class pet comes up. I have mixed feelings about class pets. I think they can be very useful for studying life cycles and animal habitats, but I don’t like the idea of animals in cages. I may read this book the next time the issue arises in my classroom. It will be an essential text during the interpretation unit and could also be an interesting one to read or reread during Social Issues.
When I was looking for images of this book I came across a website with a fantastic resource. Through the Magic Door is an online bookstore that has put together some fabulous lists of books that may be very useful when making text sets. Hawk, I’m Your Brother can be found under the list of books that are all about Flying.
Teachable Texts 