Schema:  sticks, playing with sticks

Text-to-Text Connections: Over in the Meadow, an old rhyme about the animals in a meadow; the rhyme goes something like, “over in the meadow in the sand and the sun lived an old mother turtle and her little turtle one…”  See the lyrics

Also a connection with the Gingerbread Man stories as the stick is running from animals and people.

Personification: the stick is personified

Predicting: Ask students to predict what the stick man will be used for next as you are reading the story.

Because a dog grabs him, the effect is that stick man gets farther and farther away from his home.  Every situation where Stick Man is taken can be used as a cause and effect example.

Because Santa Claus rescued the Stick Man, the effect is that he is taken back to his tree.

Organizational Strategies:  Create a flow chart showing the stick’s movement throughout the story.

Text-to-Self Connections: taking something without permission, not wanting to get caught, getting together with relatives for the holidays,  seeing something and then remembering something you forgot about

Predicting: Predict what Maria is going to do when her mother leaves to answer the phone.

Drawing Conclusions: What conclusion does Maria come to about the whereabouts of the ring?  What clues from the story lead you to this conclusion?  First she thinks it is in a tamale because she thinks it fell off of her thumb and went into the masa.  Secondly, she thinks Danny swallowed it.

When did Mother come to the conclusion that Maria was playing with the ring? The clues from the story indicate that she found it in the masa since she “scraped off a flake of dried masa”  from the ring.

At what point do you think Maria’s mother found the ring in the masa?  Maybe when she sent Maria to get her father to help?

Synthesis: What do you think Maria synthesized from this experience?  to tell the truth immediately? to leave other people’s belongings alone?

Author’s Purpose: to share the experience of  learning about Christmas in Japan.

Mental Images: The mother describes the lights and trees in California to her son.

Organizational Strategy: Flashback: the book begins with the narrator telling the reader that he had not been back to the pond since he was not old enough to wear long pants.

Point of View: the story is told from the young boy’s point of view.  Because his mother does not meet him at the door as usual, he infers that she might be mad at him for something.  He then wonders why she is acting so strangely making the cranes, digging up the tree, and being so quiet.

Drawing a Conclusion: The mother in the story concludes that her son has been to the fish pond because he is flushed, wet, and cold when he comes home.

Sequence the events in the story from the time the young boy gets home, to the end when he and his father build a snowman.

Simile: At the end of the story, the author compares the passing of the days and time to the snow that has melted away; they are both now gone.

Author’s Purpose:   Gloria Houston and her family grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina; the historical fiction story depicts what life was like in the early 1900′s during World War I.

Characterization: Characterize the mother in the story and use example from the text as evidence to support your depiction.

Loyal: She went to the rocky craigs to cut the tree that her husband promised to deliver to the church saying her husband was as good as his word.

Self-sacrificing: She cut up her wedding dress to make a dress for Ruthie to wear in the Christmas play at church.  She also used the nylons her husband mailed to her from Europe to make the doll for Ruthie that became the family heirloom.

Sense of humor:  She went along with the preacher about inferring that the people in the holler were hearing the heavenly angels singing on high the night they cut the tree.

Strong: She used the big saw to cut the tree and then loaded it on the sleigh.

Brave and Courageous: She knew how to “make do” with what they had by using honey instead of sugar, herbal tea instead of coffee, embroidering flowers over rips and tears and lowering the hems of Ruthie’s dresses.

Creative: She designed Ruthie’s dress and created the doll who looked like Ruthie.

Organizational Strategy:  the Flashback:  The story begins with the narrator saying the story happened the way that Ruthie told her.

Metaphor: The old woman was picking her geese for the snow

Simile: the road wound like ribbons