Stellaluna & What Do You Do With a Tail Like This: Putting it All Together

Hi Cole Teachers!  I'm making some changes to my literacy lesson plans this week - specifically to the essential questions for the read aloud - so I wanted to share my plans and handouts with you.  If you have any questions about the changes and why I've made them, come see me in my room between 1:00 and 1:45 on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.

Here's my plan for putting these stories together at the end of the week (lesson plan here and independent practice sheet here).  

I do think that it's going to take some coaching to get the kids to the place where they can answer this question, I'll make some notes about our discussion when I teach this lesson today (Thursday); feel free to come by this afternoon (right after school - I'm leaving early today) if you want to hear my thoughts on how it goes.

What Do You Do With a Tail Like This?: Our Second Reading

Hi Cole Teachers!  I'm making some changes to my literacy lesson plans this week - specifically to the essential questions for the read aloud - so I wanted to share my plans and handouts with you.  If you have any questions about the changes and why I've made them, come see me in my room between 1:00 and 1:45 on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.

As a reminder, here are the changes I made to the plan for teaching What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? at the start of the week.  (If you read my first post about this text, skip down to the bottom to grab the lesson plans and independent practice page.)

STUDENT OUTCOMES: What should students know, understand, and be able to do through this text?
Culminating Question:	Sample Student Response:
How do we value diversity? Specific Book Question: How do the animals in this text differ?	The animals use their noses for different functions like digging in the mud, smelling, smelling, breathing, or even to take a bath. They all use their noses differently, which is amazing.
Correlating Objectives:
Day 1: SWBAT explain how animals use their noses and ears differently. Day 2: SWBAT explain how animals use their tails, eyes, and mouths differently. SWBAT explain that like animals we are all different, but we value diversity in humans and in animals.

The Original Questions and Exemplar Response

1.  I wanted our first reading to be focused on understanding the text and working at a lower level of Bloom's Taxonomy to identify and describe the animals bodies as we familiarized ourselves with the information presented by this non-fiction text.  I expanded the question to include all of the adaptations mentioned in the text because I worried that focusing on noses and ears exclusively might limit our discussion too much and that such a narrow discussion would make it hard for me to effectively analyze students' independent work and understanding.

2.  I wanted our second reading of the text to push students to analyze the information they'd learned over the course of the week.  I changed the focus from describing what the adaptations are to stating their purpose and inferring why each animal needs to use their body differently.  I thought that my students would be ready for this higher level analysis and that such analysis would better prepare them to answer the culminating question for the week.

	Day 1 – Monday	Day 2 – Tuesday	Day 3 – Wednesday	Day 4 – Thursday
Daily Focus Question	How are birds and bats different? Cite evidence from the text.	How do animals use their bodies in different ways? Cite evidence from the text.	How are birds and bats different? Cite evidence from the text.	Why do animals use their bodies in different ways? Cite evidence from the text.
Culminating Question	Why are differences important in our world? Optional Extension Question: How can we respect differences in our classroom and our school?

My Final Questions for the Week

You can find my full lesson plans for this text here and a copy of my students' independent practice here.

Stellaluna: Our Second Reading

Hi Cole Teachers!  I'm making some changes to my literacy lesson plans this week - specifically to the essential questions for the read aloud - so I wanted to share my plans and handouts with you.  If you have any questions about the changes and why I've made them, come see me in my room between 1:00 and 1:45 on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday.

My kids really enjoyed our first reading of Stellaluna and their independent work showed that they did a great job of understanding the plot of the story.  I'm really looking forward to analyzing the story with them in our second reading.  

As I mentioned yesterday, I made a few changes to the questions for this week because I didn't fully understand the alignment between them and how they all worked together to form the culminating question.  Here's what I did in preparing for our second reading of Stellaluna.

STUDENT OUTCOMES: What should students know, understand, and be able to do through this text?
Culminating Question:	Sample Student Response:
How do we value diversity? Specific Book Question: What lesson do Stellaluna and the young birds learn about diversity or being different?	Strong friendships can develop regardless of differences. Stellaluna learns that she does not have to change who she is, what she eats, or how she hangs in order to be friends with the birds.
Correlating Objectives:
Day 1: SWBAT to distinguish differences between bats and birds. Day 2: SWBAT to distinguish similarities and differences between their friends.

The Original Questions and Exemplar Response

1.  To me, our texts and their associated objectives are more about recognizing and valuing difference than they are about diversity, so my first change was a language tweak.  In my culminating question for this week, I'll be asking about the value of difference, not diversity.  (Note: In my classroom during the school year, if I were planning a unit about diversity I would likely change the texts rather than the objective.  But because our texts are fixed at summer school, I changed the objective to match our readings.)

2.  The sample student response leads me to believe that what we're actually asking is what Stellaluna and the birds learn about friendship, not what they learn about differences.  Again, this is a small language change, but I think it will make things more straightforward for my students.

	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4
Daily Focus Question	How are birds and bats different? Cite evidence from the text.	How do animals use their bodies in different ways? Cite evidence from the text.	What lesson do Stellaluna and the young birds learn about friendship?  Cite evidence from the text.	Why do animals use their bodies in different ways?
Culminating Question	Why are differences important in our world? Optional Extension Question: How can we respect differences in our classroom and our school?

My Final Questions for the Week

You can find my full lesson plans for this text here and a copy of my students' independent practice here.