It’s July’s LOVED That Lesson Linky!

This month’s “Loved That Lesson” link up has a little different feel!  Because MOST of us aren’t teaching yet, I thought it would be fun to share some lessons we are EXCITED to teach when school starts up again!
My “I Can’t Wait To Love This Lesson” revolves around a new picture book I found this summer by Ashley Spires.
This book about “a regular girl”, takes her through the process of attempting to create “the most magnificent thing”, the result of a BRILLIANT idea she had.  Things don’t go according to plan, however, and this “regular girl” (never named in the book) has to work herself through frustration, anger, and even considers giving up on her idea.  She decides to take a little walk to cool herself down–and on her walk a solution comes to her.  The book has absolutely adorable illustrations and wonderful repetitive language–especially some delicious action words!
I’m in the process of deciding how I really want to take this book and make it an “anchor” for the year…because I know I want my students to really get good at persevering through challenges, being risk takers, and handling frustration well.
  
Here are my thoughts…so far!
First, this book is going to be a GREAT way to practice having those great discussions that sometimes are hard at the beginning of the year when students don’t know each other.  I can already think of a number of discussion prompts that I think will be really engaging for students…questions like:
1.  Talk about a time when you were SO frustrated that you wanted to quit.
2. Think about a time when you didn’t handle a situation very well.  In the book it said, “It is not her finest moment.”  What is a time where you did not have YOUR finest moment?
3. What did the “regular girl” do to calm down?  What are some other things we can do to calm ourselves down when we are frustrated?
4.  What are the big ideas or lessons from this text?  Why do you think Ashley Spires wrote this book–and what does she want you to remember?
Once we have spent some time talking about the text, I want to have my students write about it!  I figure this will be an easy way to get my students to write about something to give me a snapshot of their writing “basics”…at the beginning of the year so many students shut down because they can’t think of a topic…this topic will “prime the pump” for them so they have something to write about.  (Want to do this too?  I’ve made a little freebie using some of those questions above as writing prompts–feel free to CLICK HERE to grab it if you want!)
Finally, I think I want to tie this to some of those beginning of the year ‘building classroom culture” lessons as well and am going to ask the students to help me create an anchor chart to help us remember how to help others when they DO get frustrated.  This is one way we can talk about this book throughout the year–because I plan on students having to face frustration this year.  We have LOTS of challenging work ahead of us!
Want to get a better look at the book?  Here’s my affiliate link to it on Amazon.

Don’t forget that you have a WEEK to link up your blog post if you have a great lesson planned for fall!  Also, make sure to stop by the other linked up posts and let the authors know what you think!  Stop back on the second Sunday of August for our NEXT “Loved That Lesson” linky!

Meg