I do weekly storybook classes for what is supposed to be the majority of the school year, but last year ended up not running as long due to kids being online for part of the year.

Anyway, I decided I could share some of my resources and lesson plans. I hope this can help some of you.

Most of the below is targeted for grade 4, my students are not overall high-level grade 4s, so if yours are I am sure you will need to make some adaptations. These lessons could possibly be used for grade 3 if you had a higher-level grade 3, though I think 4 is better since they generally are better with writing and reading.

One lesson below is for Grade 6, a special Halloween reading class that I had to prepare. It went great and I think it's difficult to find storybooks that that age group enjoys, so I figured I'd share in case anyone else has to do something similar.

I cannot share the book PPTs that I made, but if you have the books you could make one yourself. I'm sorry about this and wish I could (or I guess I should say that I was brave enough), but while I don't mind sharing worksheets I made for educational purposes, distribution of a full book is rather different so I'll tell you guys the title and give you the other class materials as I am able.

Might need to make a few posts. Book threads will be below. It might take me some time to get through my whole list but I'll post as much as I can.

There are some materials I am not comfortable sharing and I'm sorry about that. I would share them all if I didn't have concerns about distributing full book content, licensed content, etc. but I prefer to be safe rather than sorry. When I use one of those instead I will describe what I did so you could re-create it if you wanted.

Disclaimer to say that all resources posted are for educational use only.

Bark George by Jules Feiffer
Grade 3/4

A great deal of this lesson was adapted from erinenglish's post here: https://waygook.org/index.php?topic=91288.0 but I did make some changes, so I'm posting my files here.

I only spent one day on Bark, George because it's basically just a lesson on animal sounds. The kids liked the lesson, though.

LESSON PLAN

• Hidden pictures animals primer (on Animal Sounds and Games PPT)
• Intro to animal sounds - pass out animal worksheet (PDF and word doc attached - PDF is for anyone who doesn't have the fonts). This part continues on with the same PPT, the students should fill in the animal sounds as you go and then color the animals in the appropriate color. I gave the kids a minute to guess the sound since some of them knew some of the sounds already.
• Read the book.
• The animals PPT covers a bit of sentence structure that is helpful for the next activity. You can go over it or not. ("What does the ____ say?" "The cat says ____.")
• Play Ylvis "The Fox" on YouTube and have the kids listen for the sounds. Ask them after one time what sounds they could remember hearing in the song that they learned earlier in the lesson. Play the video again and see if they can find any more. My kids liked when I asked "What does the fox say?" and they got to make silly sounds. We are now old so our kids have never heard this song, and mine got a kick out of the video.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jofNR_WkoCE

• This lesson was quick so I ended up concluding the class with this read-aloud of Bark, George from YouTube.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1x_1INwvzg

Spooky Old Tree by Stan and Jan Berenstain
Grade 3/4

Continuing on with the Halloween theme, I actually ended up teaching this to several grades as a general Halloween-themed reading lesson. In my opinion, this book is best suited for 3-4.

This was a book I loved as a kid and it is one of my absolute favorites for ESL. It has the repetition and super-simple, easy-to-understand language for lower grades, but the pictures are gorgeous and the kids thought it was a really exciting spooky read. Even though it's an easy read, it doesn't condescend, if you know what I mean? It's written for younger kids but doesn't have that obvious "this is a baby book" aspect that I find with a lot of books that are English level-appropriate for these grades.

So... originally this class was 2 days and I'll post the plan for 2 days. However, until corona restrictions ease, I think you should hold off on the second day. More info below.

Note: Attached worksheets originally had 2 pictures from below-mentioned TPT side. I removed those so if you use you should either download the material I mentioned at the link below, or find your own via google search.

DAY 1

• Preteach vocab with flashcards. A note if you are teaching this book for older students (grade 5 and up) - one of the vocabulary words is "shivers." My fifth graders thought this word sounded like... something else in Korean. I basically had to chill out my 5th grade boys saying, "This is English class, think in English, please." If you think your kids won't be able to get over the word "shivers," you could edit the book text to read "chills" or something like that, maybe. I don't think it would ruin the story. It wasn't a huge deal to me and the littler kids didn't have any issues with the word.
• Read the story together as a class. This story is awesome for class discussion while you read like "What do you see?" "What's this?" - so much to look at in this book.
• Complete sequencing activity (vocab/sequencing worksheet is attached). I recommend doing this along with the reading as the third graders tend to lose track of order afterwards.
• Picture bingo game. Yikes, I want to include this but I bought the resource on Teachers Pay Teachers. If you check out this link (https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/The-Spooky-Old-Tree-BOARDMAKER-Bingo-4131096) you can purchase the bingo board. It does take some work - I basically cut the board I downloaded into pieces (individual bingo squares), then moved them in different orders. I made as many boards as I had students, but it took maybe an hour total to make that many different ones, so not terrible I think. I also then pasted each bingo square into a word doc and blew them up so that I could make laminated cards for myself. When we played bingo, I pulled a card from the stack and showed it to the kids, since not all of them know all of this story vocab without a reference. They could look at the picture if they couldn't read/identify the word independently. If we didn't have corona I would have laminated each board to re-use and let them do dry-erase markers, but instead I just printed black and white boards we could throw away. Next year I will do the laminated ones.
  
• Word search if you have the time.

DAY 2
Okay, so, this book has a board game that goes with it. I wanted to play the game with my class as it is quite simple but, corona, so we couldn't do an actual board game. I had the horrible idea to try to play a board game on the PPT and it was just bad, so I do not recommend that.

For post-corona, I think this would be AWESOME, though. You can find a picture of the gameboard on Google images. As far as I can tell it is no longer sold as it is now over 30 years old. So if you want to play you can just make your own board. You can use my spooky dice (attached) if you want. Regular dice are also fine, spooky dice are more fun and also remind them when they need to flip over a puzzle piece on the board.

The game is quite simple. You have 4 teams: Light, stick, rope, and key. Each team has a different starting place on the game board but everyone's path is equidistant. They have to go all the way around the gameboard to their team's "home" to win. The gameboard has some special rules:

• If you land on a space with the same item as your team (e.g., Team Rope lands on the rope picture) they get to skip ahead to the next rope picture on the board.
• Puzzle pieces can be flipped to either the normal side or the shortcut side (shortcut is yellow with a picture of bears running across it). If the normal side is up then the team approaching the puzzle piece has to go the long way around it. If the shortcut side is up, they can take the shortcut across the puzzle piece and skip several squares. The idea is for the teams to strategize and try to block other teams from using shortcuts, while helping their own by using as many shortcuts as they can.
• If you land on a puzzle piece picture, you should flip over any puzzle piece on the board.
• If you roll a 2 or a 4 you also flip a puzzle piece in addition to moving ahead on the gameboard.

Instructions for the game are attached in the PPT here in Korean with pictures. I think this game would be super fun for the kids to play in groups. It would take some prep to make but honestly I think it is worth it. The game reviews some of the key vocab and is just an awesome and topical activity to do with this book.

I really hope I get a chance to use this post-corona because the kids did like the game, it just wasn't interactive enough as a PPT where they couldn't move their own pieces, etc.

Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds
Grade 6

Grade 6 resource here! I was tasked with preparing a storybook class for my adolescent students... my first thought was YIKES. At this age, they are definitely too old for most storybooks but their English isn't advanced enough for tween/teen books. Ended up finding this story on YouTube and thought it might be just zany enough to work. It went over great! The kids thought it was so weird that they didn't mind that it was technically a kids' book. They thought the idea of a bunny being stalked by carrots was really funny and we had a lot of fun reading it and doing the activities.

I'm a pretty dynamic/energetic reader so I think that helped and my coteacher translated most of the story as we went. I'm not sure I would attempt this if you don't have a CT who can help translate. The book is a little bit difficult for where they are at - I had to find something on the Halloween/spooky theme and I primarily wanted to find one that they would enjoy. It has some challenging parts - the pictures could help, but I think it's still a little difficult if you can't get ANY translation help. Another option would be to translate it and add clickable translation on the PPT. I have done that before.

All resources attached, there is a PDF of the worksheets in case you don't have the font. Otherwise you can use the word doc, there's no difference.

DAY 1

• Since it was a Halloween class, I started the day with a 10-minute primer I made about Halloween in my home country (US). Not going to share because it includes personal photos, but obviously the kind of thing you could easily make on your own.
• Pre-teach vocabulary with flashcards. Have the kids fill in vocab words on the worksheet.
• Read the book together and invite participation/feedback as you go.  Students should complete the cloze part of the worksheet by writing in vocab words as you come to them in the story. I added numbers on the PPT to remind myself to tell them to write the word.
• You might not think it but this took our entire class period. Before we left the class, my CT primed the kids for the next class by telling them they would be drawing/designing a creepy creature. We asked them to think of an everyday object that they could make spooky, and explained that they would be writing a small backstory/description about what made it spooky.

DAY 2

• Quick vocab review.
• Design a creepy creature. We jumped right in and had them do the drawing activity. It was awesome and they did a great job.
• Mad-Libs style activity! I wrote a template for this and they have to fill in words to make a weird story about a haunted/creepy object. I gave them a list of a bunch of nouns/adjectives/verbs since it is hard for my kids to come up with them otherwise. The higher-level students added their own and the lower-level ones chose words from the worksheet. These were a lot of fun and I really enjoyed their stories. I showed them an example first and I'm attaching that, but you should obviously black out or replace my name on the example unless your name is also Teacher Ella.

This is it for now. I think I'm going to be continuing with this class this year, so I will add resources as they are available, although I cannot promise it will be speedy. I am planning to add Green Eggs and Ham for sure and maybe The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I also did a lesson on We're Going on a Bear Hunt but unfortunately the number of resources I could actually upload for this is so small I feel like it is not even helpful.

All of the lessons above were a success with my classes and I've let you know where I had issues for the most part so you know what to change.

If anyone has questions feel free to send me a PM. Please don't ask for the book PPTs though as I'm not comfortable distributing that content. I know it takes a ton of time to make them but these resources took a lot of time too. I probably spend about 12 hours on every lesson between making the book and planning/creating all the resources so please understand that. Almost all of this is stuff I made myself from scratch and I just wanted to help someone else save the time. I felt quite lost when I started doing these classes so I thought this would be a helpful start to anyone else who has to do something similar to get some ideas and just not have to make some resources.