Ready-to-teach lesson
Whole-Book Plan
Diary of a Spider - Grade 3 - Short lesson
TIME
OBJECTIVE
PRODUCT
16 minutes Read the whole book and explain whose diary it is, what happens A chart of school life, and the last in it, and what the last entry asks for. entry Essential question: What does a spider's year look like from the inside?
- Materials
- Text to mark
- • The book
- • Passage 1 - two spiders on a pencil, one in a fedora
- • One chart each
- • Passage 5 - a human basketball game, seen from inside the net
- Prepared passages: Passage 1, Passage 5, Passage 9, Passage 22
Lesson sequence
1 Before reading - 3 min
- Passage 9 - the spider smeared sideways across its own web
- Passage 22 - a leaf for a boat, and a drinks can lettered SPIDER'S
- CLUBHOUSE
- Focus:
- What people think about spiders
- Teacher direction:
- Ask the class what they know about spiders and whether they like them. Write the answers up and keep them, because the last page of the book is about exactly that.
- Prepared text:
- Passage 22 2 Teacher model - 5 min
- Teacher model:
- I read the first entry and notice what kind of book this is going to be. It has a date on it, it is written as I, and the first thing in it is a grandparent handing out three rules at school. So it is a diary, and the life in it is going to be an ordinary school life belonging to something that is not a child. child.
page 1
- Prepared text:
- Passage 1 3 An ordinary school year - 8 min
- Focus:
- Gym class, and a safety drill
- Teacher direction:
- Using Passages 5 and 9, write two things that happen at the spider's school and say what makes them different from your school.
- Expected answer:
- In gym class the spider's class learn how to catch the wind so they can travel to faraway places - so the skill being taught is ballooning on a thread, and the illustration shows it happening inside a human gym while a basketball game goes on around them. And the school holds a safety drill, which the spider gets wrong: instead of stopping, dropping and running he stops what he is doing, forgets where he was going and runs screaming from the room. The drills and the lessons are exactly like a school's, and what they are about is not.
- Student product:
- Two boxes: what happened, and how it differs
- Prepared text:
- Passage 5, Passage 9
Support & extension
Above: The spider says he and Fly get along fine. Explain why that is a surprising friendship, using what Grampa says on the first page.
Below: Fill the two boxes, then write what the last entry asks for.
Assessment
- Says the book is a spider's diary
- Says the entries have dates
- Gives one thing that happens at the spider's school
- Says he molted, or outgrew his skin
- Says he wishes people would not judge all spiders
page 2