Now the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost. Romans 15:13
It gets to be the end of the year and most of your belongings are packed up. You still want an engaging lesson to keep those students busy. The perfect solution-a picture book study!
Everything had been returned to their homeroom teachers so I grabbed an OLD picture book off my shelf. I chose it because it caught my eye and I love to have the experience of a new book right along with the kids. Thankfully in our school teachers often remember the resource room when they retire or clean off their shelves and I get a lot of unique books that way.
This little gem was called, NO BOYS ALLOWED, by Ursula Moray Williams, 1972. The kids thought it was pretty cool that it was published before I was even born. We did the normal book study stuff-analyzed the cover, predicted the genre, and dove right into this amazing little book. I projected the pages onto the big screen as I read it to the class.
What made it even more fun was that it had several unfamiliar words that I had never heard before (archaic words were used a lot in this story about a group of cousins sailing on a ship in the 1800's). I had a great opportunity to model using context clues and then going on line to see if I was correct.
The kids were engaged and really enjoyed the lesson. After completing a story map, I dug out some island themed paper and they illustrated what they predicted happened after the story ended.
