This time of year, our students begin to shift from learning how to write to writing strategically. With most state tests now having some type of written response or moving towards that, we must begin laying that foundation at a young age. If you have been to an EW workshop, you know how much we love Brave Irene, and we wanted to share this book cover lessons with you!
Before our students move directly into a fully elaborated written response, we must teach them how to pull out the critical literary or story elements and understand why the author used them. These story-building blocks are what make the story what it is. If even one of these changes, the whole story plot would also change. Our students have recognized these as readers forever. Now the shift comes where they begin to recognize them in the eyes of an author. With this shift in thinking, our students understand what these literary elements are for, how to use them, and the vital role they play in the layout of the whole story.
You will begin this lesson by recognizing these elements as you read aloud the book Brave Irene. You may choose to chart them whole group or identify them together aloud as you read the book. Students will then record their answers to the literary question stems on the PDF. All of your EW guides provide a list of appropriate literary analysis questions for the grade you teach. The samples I am showing you come from second grade, but you can adapt them for any grade level.
Once your students have answered the literary questions, it is time to frame up those responses with sentence stems. Again, these are provided in your guides! This particular lesson focuses specifically on the theme of the story. Most of the time, short constructed responses will pull one element from the story and have the student focus on it while they elaborate a written response.
One by one, you will see how the student generated the response in the literary analysis from the answer to the framing question with evidence provided directly from the story.

Click the book cover templates below to download and then copy them double-sided! Just post a pic or two on my FB group Love to Write and Read All-Day to share... pretty please:) 

And don't forget to check out the sample lesson from second grade! Click here to read them.

Click below to download your student book cover pages!