Teaching with Tomie dePaola Books Part 4: Responding to Literature

Graphics by Lisa Parnello & Sonya DeHart 

As we transition to Common Core and implement new writing frameworks 

in my district our students are learning to use the writing piece of Thinking Maps  

to organize and plan their writing.  

Teaching students to write a response to literature has been our focus this quarter. 

After reading Strega Nona Meets Her Match we wrote a character analysis of 

Strega Amelia.  I asked my students which book and character we should choose and 

hands down it was this one! Guess why?  I wish I could say it was deeper than this, 

but it's because she dresses fancy and wears makeup! And they love that she's sassy!

They've noticed that many of Tomie dePaola's characters have little black dots for eyes.

Except Strega Amelia....  She has fancy blue makeup on! 

I guess you just never know what's going to make an impression!

We talked a lot about this character and reviewed her relationship with

Strega Nona.  We thought back to telling events from other stories in the series 

that might give us some insight into Strega Amelia's character.

In their journals, students made these maps describing the character and gave 

reasons for their word choices. 

As students shared their ideas I recorded them on a class chart.

Next, I had students fold a piece of  legal size paper into 4 parts and choose 

markers in 5 colors to color code each step. This is a 3-4  day process so 

I have students make a little tally mark in the top corner of the page with their colors so 

they remember which ones they should take out the next day. From here it is an

 "I do" then "You do" process. I first modeled each step then it was their turn.

This is the first time my second graders have written a character analysis so we started 

very simple.  I wrote a topic sentence that introduced the character then

 chose three adjectives I wanted to tell more about and recorded them in this map.

Students used their own  bubble maps and did the same. 

We added details under each description that we wanted to include 

in our writing. Lastly, we wrote a closing sentence that included a feeling,

 a personal connection, or an opinion about

the character. We color coded  these as we went along. 

 Next, we used the same color coding to write a rough draft. 

Here we added transition words and any changes.

I had originally planned for us to publish our writing in these little Strega Nona houses, 

but when my kiddos saw these they begged me to put our letters 

 to Tomie dePaola, written the previous week, inside Strega Nona's house

and mail them to him. So, that's just what we're going to do!

We've been publishing one piece of writing each quarter in these seasonal

trees from my September Writing Activities pack

to save for our end of year open house so we published our writing

 instead in these spring trees.

 I originally made different writing inserts for our Strega Nona houses but since we

were sending them to "our Tomie" as my one little sweetie 

refers to him, students instead wrote 3 wishes they have, things they noticed

during our author study, and their favorite Tomie dePaola book. 

Oh my gosh, these turned out so cute!  I really just wanted to keep 

every single one of them!  We hear that Tomie actually writes back to kids 

and my class is very worried that they'll be in third grade when he does. 

 I have solemnly sworn to gather them all up when/if (fingers crossed!) we receive a letter 

so we can all open it together! 

If you'd like to make Strega Nona's house 

with your class, you can!  

**I have just added this to 

my Tomie dePaola Author Study.  If you have previously

 purchased the unit on TPT simply 

go to your 'My Purchases' page and re-download the 

updated file for FREE!**

 I've also added  this variation to my TPT store if you don't own the unit and

would like to purchase it separately.

You can see all the posts in this series by clicking the pictures below. 

            

          

                                                     

                                                       All of the activities in these posts can 

be found in my Tomie dePaola Author Study on

TeachersPayTeachers and Teacher's Notebook.

Visit my Tomie dePaola board on Pinterest!

Thanks so much for following along and happy teaching with Tomie books, friends!