For millions of readers worldwide, this mysterious journey to the North Pole has become a beloved classic. In this 30th anniversary edition, the inimitable artistry of Chris Van Allsburg is revealed in a never-before-seen fashion, with a new jacket design and expanded interior layout. Later that night he hears not bells but a very different sound.
He looks out his window and is astounded to see a steam engine parked in front of his house! Discuss with your students how using comparisons in descriptions can make the story come to life.
Encourage them to try using a comparison or two in their own writing that day. Writing Time: As your students write independently, confer with them about their work. Encourage them to use comparisons in their descriptions like Van Allsburg does in order to make their writing come to life. If you do not have an ongoing writing workshop in place in your classroom, you can give your students more structure before you send them off to write.
For example, you may want to ask them to imagine they are on a dream journey like the boy's journey on the Polar Express and then write that story. In the context of that assignment, you can confer with them about using comparisons in their writing.
Share: After your students have worked independently, bring the class back together. Share the work of a student or several students who tried out the idea of using comparisons in their descriptions. Adapting This Lesson for Less Experienced Writers: Instead of eliciting the comparisons from the students, point them out. Spend more time scaffolding their understanding. Create some comparisons together before sending the children off to write on their own. For example, choose an object in the room to describe in a plain way "the ceiling is gray" and then using a comparison "the ceiling is as gray as rain clouds".
Make a chart listing them, and then turn each craft move into a day's lesson. It is also helpful if your students are familiar with the concept of a timeline. The lesson works best in classrooms where reading aloud is a part of each day, a time when your classroom community gathers together and develops comprehension through book discussions.
The lesson is designed for classrooms that support ongoing reading-workshop work, where students read independently or in partnerships each day from books of their own choosing.
This depends on having a leveled classroom library stocked with books appropriate for young readers. If you do not use a reading workshop in your curriculum or do not have a leveled classroom library, the lesson can take place in the context of the stories your students are working with in their readers. Before this lesson, it is important to organize your students into "talk partnerships" and to ask them to sit next to these partners when they come to the reading area.
You will be asking them to turn and talk to each other during the lesson. Introduction: Tell your students that one thing that helps readers make sense of the stories they read is to stop and retell what has happened so far, including only the important parts in their retelling. One way that readers keep track of the important parts and how they fit together is to make a timeline. Tell your students to watch you as you read Van Allsburg's The Polar Express , paying attention to how the story moves forward, while you make a timeline to help you retell the story.
Tell them that they will be asked to help you with this process, and that they will get to try it out with their own books during independent reading time. Teaching: As you read the story, tell the children to pay attention to how you stop, retell what has happened so far, add the important parts to your timeline, and then continue to read. Begin reading the story. Stop after a few pages.
One good first stopping point is when the boy gets on the train. Model retelling what has happened so far in the story, paying attention to only the most important parts. For example, you might say, "The boy was lying awake, waiting to hear the sounds of Santa's sleigh bells.
Instead, he heard a train. He ran outside, and the conductor invited him on board the Polar Express, a train bound for the North Pole. Draw a line on the chart paper or overhead and add the first bit. Tell your students that when you are making a timeline, you do not need to write complete sentences, just notes to yourself to help you remember. The first point on the timeline might be "boy is in bed waiting to hear Santa.
The next time you stop, ask them to turn and talk to their partners, retelling what has happened so far. Give them only two or three minutes for this.
When you come back together, elicit the next points on the timeline from your students. If they offer small details or go off on unrelated tangents, model for them how readers decide what the most important parts of the story are when they are doing a retelling and making a timeline. Tell them that they will be doing this on their own when they go off to read independently. Reading Time: If you work within a reading-workshop context, ask your students to sit next to their talk partners when you send your students off to read independently.
As they begin reading, remind them to stop every few pages and retell what has happened so far. If your students use reading response notebooks, ask them to create their own timelines in their notebooks. They can do this on loose-leaf paper if they don't use notebooks.
As your students read, confer with them about how readers retell only the most important parts of stories and put those things on a timeline.
If you do not work within the context of reading workshop, you can choose to keep your students together and finish the timeline of The Polar Express as a community. You can also ask your students to work within their readers to create a timeline of whatever story they happen to be working on together.
You can organize them into partnerships for the context of this lesson even if they do not generally work this way. Fortunately, the next morning, Hero Boy finds the bell in a present with a note from Santa saying it was in his sleigh the whole time and that he should fix that hole in his pocket. The Polar Express Wiki Explore. Browse wiki. Explore Wikis Community Central.
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