Heavy Lifting in 5th Grade!

The end of our first reading unit is so intense and I love it! We have spent the past 6 weeks in book clubs that have gotten the kids so engaged and have led to amazing ownership of their learning. Throughout the book club we have looked deeply at the characters, thought critically about the author's craft, and wrote vigorously about our reactions to the texts. The kids have flown through books in this unit and has been a great success!

The last part of the unit is the heavy lifting for our readers! We are working on comparing and contrasting the way that multiple authors approach the same theme or life lesson. First I modeled this idea using our read aloud, Home of the Brave and the story Fly Away Home.  We took some time to dig deeper in the stories and find similarities and differences in the characters, setting, character problems, and character relationships. We used a Venn Diagram to show our thinking. Then the kids set off to find a similar theme between their book club books and a picture book or poem. 

First the students read the picture book as a book club and tried to determine a common theme.

Then the students worked to complete a graphic organizer of their choice that tracks the similarities and differences within the two stories. This is the HEAVY lifting! The kids worked diligently and thought so deeply about the stories, it was amazing!

Now that we have done the heavy lifting, we will use all of this to construct a written response describing how multiple authors can approach the same theme in similar and different ways!