Teaching with Stellaluna: Turning Readers Into Comprehenders

Here in Arizona we don't have a typical fall season and I 

always look forward to October when I can create 

the feeling of fall in my classroom! Along with 

strands upon strands of colorful fall leaves, October means 

pumpkins, nocturnal animals, and Stellaluna! 

One of my favorite books, Stellaluna lends itself so

perfectly to to digging deeper and helping me in my

ongoing mission to turn my readers into comprehenders.

We spend time analyzing Stellaluna as a character and

describing how she responds, changes, and adapts 

to the life-changing events and challenges she faces. 

We thought of adjectives to describe her during each 

part of the story and gave evidence to support our

descriptions.

  Each of the characters in this story has a very distinct 

point of view and they feel very differently (and strongly!) 

about several topics. Students compare these points of view

by making a chart.

We discuss their thoughts and then add them to our class chart.

Stellaluna is perfect not only for teaching students to identify 

the differences in points of view, because they are so apparent,

but the characters' personalities are also quite distinct.  

This makes for a lot of fun (and fluency practice) using 

character sticks while reading to a partner in 

the characters' imagined voices!

Students choose a character then take turns reading

smoothly and with expression. Oh, and did I mention 

their favorite part?  In the characters' voices.

There are some great verbs in this book!

While introducing and defining the story vocabulary I have 

students act them out.  I'm never short on volunteers begging

to give it a go!  Croon is one of my favorites. I'm always 

sure to point out that "back in the day" a singer with a

beautiful voice was called a crooner (Think Frank Sinatra.)

I play Fly Me To The Moon to give them an example

amidst lots of giggles from my girls and eye rolling 

from my boys! It made my teacher heart so happy

 this week when one of my boys tattled reported that 

he needed to work on the floor because 

so and so's crooning was disturbing his learning. Ha!

I'll take it!  Even if he is telling on one of his friends!

We  later work more with vocabulary during our literacy centers. 

Students match the words to definitions then use the vocabulary 

in context through written responses.

This year I added some Stellaluna SMARTBoard games to 

our literacy rotations. 

 

Before each game is a minilesson page for a quick review.

I review the skills whole group first, then I added 

them to our center rotation.

As another rotation we use Storyline Online by the 

SAG Foundation to listen to Stellaluna on our class computers.

Then partners or threes use these discussion cards 

to have a book talk. 

I always save teaching words with the two sounds of C
for when I get to Stellaluna because the book is packed with them!
You bet I seized that opportunity and made a word sort
for my students to play!

Over the years I've collected several copies

of Stellaluna that I use in my small groups.  

One of the things we do is look through the pages

 to locate hard/soft C words. 

We used this template to help us summarize the story.

You can download a copy here.

Throughout our book study we make character booklets and 

include our summaries as well as responses we wrote after 

some of our other lessons.

We added a piece on Stellaluna's point of view after 

our whole group lesson.

We also identified major events and challenges she faces and 

wrote about how she responds to these.

My class was so proud of their final projects!

I hope you've found some ideas you can use to help 

you turn your young readers into comprehenders

while teaching with this wonderful book.

Need help finding these resources?

Find the Stellaluna book with my Amazon affiliate link.

Find the Stellaluna book study in my shop.

Find the SMARTBoard Activities in my shop.

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Happy teaching friends!