Schema: The original story of the three little pigs

Compare and Contrast: the original story with the modern one

Personification: the robot

Characterize the robot and the wolf in the original story

The story of the Three Little Pigs meets the space age in this new twist on the original story. The three aliens all find homes in space, one on a rover, one on a satellite, and the third one on Mars where he builds a sturdy house. The planets are illustrated in order from the sun so a reader could gain some reinforcement of space learning as the book is read. This would be a support for a compare and contrast unit. The illustrations are colorful and add humor to the story.

Characterization:  Characterize the traits of a horse as each animal character shares a bit about horses.  He is told that it is a living thing, an animal, has legs, is friendly, doesn’t change color, does not lay eggs, is clean, is very fast, eats grass,  and does not have stripes.  Before reading or showing them the book have students draw a picture of what they think the animal would look like.

Personification: The wagon is personified.

Reader’s Theater: This would be a great book to use for reader’s theater with each student being one of the animals.

Drawing Conclusions: What is wrong with the conclusion that Roy came to about the horse when he finally found it?  Review the instructions that came with the saddle.

Summarizing: With the repetitive action in the story, this is a good one to briefly summarize.  Show students the summary in the CIP.

Text-to-Text Connections: Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig has similar illustrations of the animals.  The Teeny Tiny Woman also has a talking bone in the story. 

Personification: The bone takes on human characteristics and feelings.

Compare and Contrast with Chris Van Allsburg’s The Widow’s Broom.  How are the bone and the broom alike?

How did the bone help Pearl and her family?

How did the broom help the widow?

Characterization: List the fox’s characteristics.  Hungry when he describes Pearl, cruel when he talks about eating the bone,

Personification: The point of view is from the tree.  The tree’s voice is heard through a rhyming text about a tree from its roots to its branches.

Author’s Purpose: The simple text provides the reader with the basic information about how a tree grows, what lives in it, and what lives below it.  The youngest reader will know more about trees after reading this book.

Reader’s Theater: The rhyming couplets read by young children dressed as tree inhabitants would be a wonderful production!

This book would be a great example of how we have to make connections in our schema to understand and learn new things.

Personification: Robot Zot feels love for the toy phone.

POV: The story is told from Robot Zot’s point of view, but when he leaves we see the man’s POV as he thinks his dog destroyed everything.

Voice: We hear Robot Zot’s voice in the language and POV.

Schema: stranger danger

Sequencing: Days of the week are the names of the children. Sequence four events that move the story forward.

Cause and Effect: Because the children let a stranger in, they were turned into food.

Drawing Conclusions: The mother asks each child what they would like from the store.  When a witch turns the children into food, the mother must draw a conclusion as to which child is which food in order to get her children back.

Classifying: Make a classification chart placing each child in a separate section or column. Write what they wanted from the store under their name. Add underneath each child what each child was turned into by the witch.  Ask students if they can conclude how the mother knew which food was which child by looking at this information.  The clue is that each child wanted an item that went with serving the food they were turned into.

Text-to-text connection: The Three Billy Goats Gruff has a troll that is thrown into the river and never heard from again.

Text-to-Self Connection: Parents tell children to not let a stranger in and to not “touch” fire when they are home alone.

Personification: The wind takes on human traits and speaks in this tale.

Cause and Effect: Because the wind blows the sisters’ cornmeal away, the effect is that Willa is determined to get it back or get something in return.

Characterization: Willa is a strong woman character.  She can be described as fearless and aggressive. Use the idea wheel to describe Willa.

Drawing Conclusions: Willa draws the conclusion that the innkeeper is dishonest.

Predicting: Predict what the innkeeper will do when Willa arrives with the goat.

Seasons: With March winds, this is a good one to use for Spring.

Text-to-Text Connections: The Windy Day by G. Brian Karas

The Wind Blew by Pat Hutchins

Anne of Green Gable

She runs away from  her latest foster home to stay with a distant relative that she has never met, but while there bonds with  childless Augusta, an older widow woman, whose husband was taken by the sea thirty years earlier. The Prince Edward Island  story begins just after a big storm at sea.   Tango, a small Yorkshire terrier is found tangled in a lobster trap almost frozen.   Tango’s story begins in New England, where is is taken from his mother and sold to a pet shop in Manhattan.  He is bought  by a rich woman, who lives in Manhattan.  He lives a life of luxury and feels very loved.  His owner takes him on a sailboat  which was caught in a storm and Tango is washed overboard and later found frozen and wet in a lobster trap on Prince Edward Island.

Jack, a veterinarian, and Augusta feel a kinship with the lonely McKenna, who has been allowed to live temporarily in a small room  behind her uncle’s house until the end of the summer.  McKenna is allowed to paint the shed-like building and use it as a place to sell candles during the summer tourist season.  Augusta and Jack provide McKenna with the tools and supplies she needs to make candles to sell to the summer tourists.  McKenna had found a recipe for  “enchanted candles” in an old Bible and had wanted to make them to earn enough money to go to Toronto to find the only foster mother that she had loved, but who had moved away saying she was unable to take McKenna with her.

In a parallel fantasy storyline, Tango, Beau fox, and a gang of evil cats are communicating in their own language about turf wars, and general meanness.  Beau, a fox, saw McKenna abandoned as a baby and left alone wrapped in a fishing net  in the marshy brush.   Beau pulls the baby out of the water and closer to the road where she is found by a young woman who cares for her until she is killed in a car accident when McKenna was two.  The uncle that McKenna goes to stay with on Prince Edward Island is not her blood relative but related to her adoptive mother. Uncle Cody is  good man, but does not have the resources or a wife who will allow him to give McKenna a home.   McKenna knows the truth about her true background by looking at her folder during a visit with her social worker, but does not tell her uncle because she needs a place to stay.    Beau  follows McKenna from one home to the next always keeping watch over her.  Beau is all alone in the world too since his mate, Tawny, was run over and killed by the man that was married to the woman who found McKenna wrapped in the fishing net.

Once on the island, Tango does everything he can to find a silver heart that had his I.D. information on it so Augusta will see it and call his owner in Manhattan to come for him.  This involves fighting a rat and battling an evil gang of cats who all have names and talk to each other and the other animals too.  Tango agrees to fight a big white rat to the death of one of them in order to win the prize of his name tag which was found by one of the cats, Nigel called Stumpy, a cat with only three legs.  Nigel is one of the cats in the gang, but he doesn’t fit in with the rest of them.  He goes along to get along.  At the end, the mean cats turn on him and try to make him fight Tango.  Suddenly a huge storm overtakes the cat’s hideout called The Pitiful Place and washes it out to sea.  Just before they are washed away, McKenna  finds Tango and Nigel and rescues them.

Augusta is healing from a fall, and during this time McKenna has taken care of her.  Augusta  realizes that she can risk loving again after all her years of hurt over the loss of her husband.  She has come to love Tango and McKenna.

McKenna tells Augusta about the charm that Tango had in his mouth after fighting the rat just before the storm.  When Beau realizes that Tango, who he was also protecting along with McKenna, is going to be ok, and that McKenna has found someone to love her, he passes on to join his mate, Tawny, who has been calling to him in his old age.  When he dies, it is not sad because he has lived a long and good life.

When Tango is reunited with Augusta after fighting for his i.d. charm, he comes to the realization that he loves Augusta and Mckenna, and he feels he would not like living in an apartment in Manhattan anymore.  He loves his leash-less freedom.   Augusta  goes to sleep with the charm under her pillow to “sleep on it” and will decide whether to call his owner the next day.

This is a wonderful book for all ages, but so special because it is a great story without any curse words making it a solid addition to any young child’s library.  It is assigned a level of 4.8 in the A.R. system.

Point of View:  The story goes back and forth between the voice and POV of  Tango, McKenna, Augusta, and Beau.

Cause and Effect: Because Tango was washed overboard, the effect is he begins a new life on Prince Edward Island.

Synthesis: We can synthesize that introducing love and the feeling of being wanted into a person or animal’s life, makes them both feel contented and settled.

Author,  Eileen Beha, has a teacher’s guide for Tango on her website.

Compare and Contrast: Use a graphic organizer such as the Venn Diagram to compare with the fairytale, Hansel and Gretel,  by James Marshall.

Personification:  The truck rigs are given personalities and speak as human characters.

Reader’s Theater: This story would lend itself well to a reader’s theater presentation.  Students could ad lib or write their own script.

Cause and Effect: Because it snowed, the rigs could not see their bolts to find their way home.

Text-to-text connections:  The Three Little Rigs by David Gordon; both stories feature trucks and both are based on fairytales

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.