I love story books! Often on the weekends, I can be found at Kidsbooks in South Surrey with my own children reading and buying books. When I don't have time, I search on Amazon for the latest, greatest books and am often heading down to Point Roberts to pick up my orders! A new favourite of mine, is Dude by Christopher Aslan. This book repeats the single word "Dude" on every page but each time it represents a different feeling.
Using the lesson suggestion by Adrienne Gear, in her book Writing Power we read the book and began inferring the character, Dude's feelings. I tweaked the lesson a little and had my students work either alone or in partners to pick a page from the story and write either what they thought the character was thinking or what he might say. They recorded this information on either a speech or thought bubble. Unfortunately I forgot my good camera... so some of these are a little blurry!
Next we played an inferring game, suggested by Gear in her lesson. One student was "it" and this student left the room. Then I gave the remaining students an emotion such as "scared". When the person who was "it" came back into the room, students shared clues about the emotion. Each student started by saying "I felt this time once when...." and described what they may have been thinking or doing. The "it" person had to guess the emotion that was being inferred.
