What Are You Reading? A Monthly Linky

Happy Sunday!  I am linking up today with some of my blogging buddies over at Focused on Fifth for our brand spankin' new monthly linky.  I am super excited about this link up because it is all about reading...a topic near and dear to my heart.

For this month's linky, I am focusing on mentor texts for teaching point of view.  Here are some of my favs.

This book has been around since I was a child and has always been a favorite of mine.  I always love to use this mentor text as a start to my point of view units because it is based off of a childhood classic everyone is familiar with.  To start, we read the original story of the three little pigs, followed by this fun twist.  We then compare and contrast the two stories using a Venn Diagram.

     

These two also made it to my list of favorites this school year.  I used Honestly, Red Riding Hood was Rotten as my second mentor text in my point of view unit.  We first watched a little animation of Red Riding Hood's original version on the SMARTBoard, then we read the story.  We compared and contrasted again using an interactive Venn Diagram (shown below).  I liked this lesson because we hit another one of the standards by analyzing point of view through different media formats. Seriously, Cinderalla is so Annoying was used after this book because instead of watching the movie or reading the book, the students needed to tap into their memory to be able to analyze the different points of view from the stories. 

Interactive Venn Diagram where students each received two different colored sticky notes.  They wrote their differences down, read them aloud to the class, then stuck them in the correct circle.  Finally, we brainstormed similarities as a class.

This little picture book is told from many different points of view, as Duncan's box of crayons write him letters expressing their true feelings on how they are each being used to color.  After reading this story, the students each closed their eyes, and selected a crayon at random from a pile.  Next, using which ever color crayon they chose, they had to write another letter to Duncan summarizing their feelings about how he uses them in the final drawing of the book.  I saved this one for the end of my unit because there are multiple points of view happening in this story. 

Our What are you Reading linky is all about book suggestions for the fifth grade classroom.  We are looking for all types of reading suggestions...including read alouds, picture books, mentor texts, professional development books...etc., etc.  If you're a fifth grade teacher...and you've got some books to share, we want to know about em'!  Click on the button below to join in on this link up!