Holes

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Home : 2004 : February : 24

Holes
By Susan

This is my favorite book to read with my 5th graders. Now that the movie is out, it's not as surprising to them, but still a great novel! I use the Teacher Created Materials Literature Guide (I know I've mentioned these
before, but I love them!), to help me with activities as we go. Some of the little things were:
1. Bring in peach preserves for them to try (you'd be surprised how many have never had them!)
2. Make a fossil (when he finds a fossil in a hole)
3. Draw out each character with their real name and nickname.
4. Make a model of Camp Green Lake (using a drink "flat" - they bring

in the other materials. That took about 3 days! We did that at the end).
5. Let the class give each other nicknames (they write them down and give them to you - so you can censor them for only encouraging ones).
6. Role play how they would act in certain situations that Stanley found himself in.
7. Make a dictionary for the vocabulary words - we played lots of games with them - Password, Pictionary, etc...).
8. Comprehension questions - from the literature guide.

I don't remember what else we did - but that might give you some thoughts. I'm not sure how quickly we went through the book, but we'd start off letting them write a summary of what we'd read the day before (a paragraph), then write a prediction of what they think will happen (a few sentences). Then we'd read for about 30 minutes, then do an activity. The total time for reading novels was an hour.
Enjoy!