Jacket

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Home : 2004 : July : 12

Jacket
By Elaine

A coworker and I have are just reading and deciding how to use The Jacket with our 4th graders. I do this book whole-class instead of in small guided reading groups because I think it has such a valid message. I like to
use it early in the year when we are just beginning to respecting differences in others.
Before Reading:
When I used this book before, I did pretty much what you did, Susan -- jounaling and discussing. This time I am going to do more with vocabulary. I was amazed to find out that almost all of my students had no understanding of the word prejudice. We found a nonfiction article

about early African American baseball players. We are going to do some guided reading activities using that article before starting to read the book.

During Reading:
I don't like to interupt the flow of such a great book by interuppting with too many assignments or activities, so we are simply going to have the students make a double entry chart in their Literature Logs to record examples of cause and effect relationships as they find them in their reading.

After Reading:
1. We will reinforce cause and effect relationships by doing some game-like activities that we found in the new (Aug/Sept I think) Mailbox Magazine.
2. I am reading Double Trouble in Walla Walla, a picture book by Clements as a lead-in to Frindle. So after reading The Jacket, we can compare and contrast those three very different books written by Andrew Clements. We'll model how to write power paragraphs, one describing the differences and one describing the similarities we discovered. Finally, students will select a favorite among the three books and write a power paragraph explaining why it is their favorite.

That's it!
Enjoy!
Elaine