October Means Stellaluna!

Happy October friends!  I'm on Fall Break this week, but school 

is never far from my brain!   I'm planning for next week and wanted 

to show you some of the things we'll be up to!  We'll be focusing on 

nocturnal animals through the end of the month and along with 

lots of bats and owls nonfiction, we'll be reading Stellaluna and 

using my Stellaluna Character and Book Study.

I love this sweet story and it lends itself so perfectly to 

many of our standards!

We spend time analyzing the characters, their differing 

points of view, and how they respond to events and change 

throughout the story. These are two of the charts we made 

last year.

As we read, we stopped to describe Stellaluna  during each part 

of the story. Students had to give evidence and events to support 

their adjectives.

One of the reasons I love this book so much is that is each of the 

characters has a very distinct point of view. 

I made blank student versions of both of these which I'll project 

on my white board.  We'll start this whole group and then the kids 

complete them during literacy centers.  My class is familiar with 

charting how a character changes then finding proof with

an organizer like this since we've done this with several other books.

I like analyzing this way whole group so that students are already 

thinking pretty deeply about the story by the time we move

into centers.  It's a great way to get that academic conversation 

started and model all of the vocabulary you want them to be using!

During our literacy centers students buddy read 

and did a "book talk".

We'll use these story sticks to practice fluency, 

reading with expression, and some Stellaluna silliness while 

reading in the different character's voices.

Here's a peek at one of our Stellaluna literacy centers.  

We'll be reviewing the two sounds of C and there are 

just so many great hard/soft c words to use in this book!

To give my students added practice with retelling and

sequencing I added this activity to sequence story events.

We'll be working with story vocabulary to define, compare and make

text to self connections.

We summarize the story to include in our character booklets using 

Somebody, Wanted, But, Then, So.

You can download a copy of this Summarize Stellaluna page {HERE}

As a culminating project we'll be making Stellaluna Character Study 

booklets.  Students describe the story's events and how Stellaluna 

responds.They also write about how she feels differently than 

the birds about sleeping, flying at night, and eating bugs!

These are just a few of our Stellaluna activities. If you'd like to do 

these with your class click {HERE} to see all the goodies 

included in the file.  Best part? It even includes a detailed pacing 

guide and 2 week lesson plan!

I just posted a pack of Stellaluna SMARTboard games 
with mini-lessons to work further with story vocabulary, 

sequencing events, fact/opinion, the two sounds of C, 

and replacing nouns with pronouns.  

I use these as a literacy stations but they'd be great whole group 

or with your interventions and English language learners too.

Along with the 5 games I've included premade templates 

so you can easily differentiate and tailor the text 

to your students' abilities.

Read more about how I use the book
Stellaluna in this post
Stellaluna: Turning Readers Into Comprehenders

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.

Happy teaching friends!

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