Eve Bunting Author Study- The Memory String

We began with The Memory String.  I love this story! Before reading, we looked at a Prezi about Eve Bunting.  I love Prezis so much more than Powerpoints, personally.  This particular Prezi was suggested by Mrs. Kennedy, and I am so grateful.  It was a nice introductory piece as we went over the fact sheet I had created for the kiddos.  

        

Eventually we will read more autobiographical texts about Eve Bunting like Once Upon a Time by Eve Bunting, S is for Shamrock by Eve Bunting, and Biographies for Beginners Issue #2- Fall 2001.  We'll also utilize the internet to access interviews and hopefully videos.  For Day 1, the Prezi and fact sheet sufficed.

         After getting a little bit of insight about the author, I asked the kiddos to think about the things that matter most in their lives.  We've been working on determining importance in texts, so this was a nice complement to help us think about ourselves and how we determine what's important and what isn't every single day.  Here are the steps we followed:

          I asked my students to jot down what matters most to them.  After they wrote their lists, they turned to talk to a partner briefly about what they feel is really important in their lives.  Then, I asked them to pick just one person, place, or thing.  When we were studying personal narratives, we talked about VIPs, very important people, places that matter and objects that matter to generate ideas.  The same thing applies here.   They have to be able to whittle down a list to one thing that they feel is more important than the others.  

             Once they did this, they were told that we would be making memory bracelets to help us remember what's really important to us.  They built words to display their words on their wrists and got to express their personalities through colored beads.  My greatest advice is, the younger the kids, the bigger the beads and always use elastic instead of string because it's easier to thread independently.   Also, have them use tape to tape down one side of the elastic.  I learned this the hard way, and there were beads scattering all over the room.  Although this was easily tied into the story, it slowed us down a bit.  

Click to Download!

 

       

Now that my students had a few minutes to think about what's important to them personally and had a chance to string beads onto a bracelet to preserve memories, I felt that they were ready to hear the story.  One of our reading coaches popped in during the read aloud to observe a vocabulary lesson, so that was the main focus initially.  I chose three Tier II words that I felt brought the kids back to the very core of the story: "memory", "scatter" and "substitute" to help them focus on the main idea even though it was a vocabulary lesson.

I will include a generic guideline for introducing vocabulary to students that you can download from Google Docs.  The actual lesson will be included in my TpT unit.

 Click to Download!