Flora and Ulysses

This is s wonderful story.  Flora witnesses (from her bedroom window) the neighbor accidentally running over a squirrel with a vacuum cleaner in her back yard.  It’s a delightful story.  Please ask your kids to tell you about it!  They are working on a few things this week that has to do with the story and talking about it with you will be helpful.  The first thing we are working on are THOUGHT BUBBLES.  Using pictures from the story, kids are writing things that the characters could be THINKING.  They need to think about the story and what they truly may be thinking (not random thoughts that have nothing to do with the story), writing things that are original and not written in the story.  Before we started thinking about the thought bubbles we were doing for Flora and Ulysses, we practiced on illustrations from two wordless picture books.  

This.  Was.   So.  Fun.  We didn’t look at the entire book, in either case, instead I chose random pictures and asked them to think about what the character was THINKING.  They were amazing.  You should totally try this at home! 

We are also writing about the book in our Reader’s Notebooks.  Our labels are a wonderful way for kids to show they know and understand what they are reading and the connections they are making.  Each label has one, two or three dots on it.  This tells the kids which labels are a bit more complex.  Although we aren’t currently writing about a book we are reading in reading groups, I will be working with kids during reading groups on their responses.  We talk a LOT about what constitutes great writing (details, interesting sentences, evidence, etc.) and the difference it makes when someone is reading your work.  These labels aren’t written to share with others, but kids will have a chance to share what they’ve written – allowing others to hear their thoughts and get ideas of their own. 

Here are our labels:

• Write about a problem that the main character faced.  How did he or she solve it?

•• Write about a time when a character did or said something unexpected or surprising.  How was that event important to the story?

••• Compare the main character of this story to the main character of a different version of the story or a similar story.