Old Yeller
Old Yeller
Old Yeller
Historical Fiction
Big Idea
- Nature deserves our respect.
Essential Question
- Can nature bring out the best in a character?
Target Vocabulary
- frantic - wild with excitement or worry
- lunging - making a sudden forward movement
- stride - the rhythm of your walking and the length or your steps
- checking - limiting or controlling something
- wheeled - turned quickly
- bounding - leaping
- shouldered - carried the weight
- strained - stretched to the limit, either physically or mentally
- romp - an energetic and noisy way to play
- picturing - creating a mental image of something
Comprehension
Target Skill
- Understanding Characters - authors try to create story characters that seem like real people with believable feelings, traits and personalities. Traits are ways of speaking and acting to show what a character is like. By examining a character's actions, words and thoughts, they can determine his or her motives or reasons for doing something. Authors often have characters grow and change during the course of a story.
Target Strategy
- Visualize - use text details to form pictures in your mind. Visualize the characters' actions and behaviors to help better understand the text.
Fluency
- Intonation - the rise and fall of the pitch of your voice. Your intonation should reflect the meaning of what is being read. The punctuation in each sentence can help guide students in expressing the correct intonation.
Decoding
- Vowel + /r/ Sounds - the letter r affects the pronunciation of vowels that come before it. Experiment and try different vowel sounds when decoding a word with a vowel followed by r. As you do this, you may realize that the word is a familiar one. Then you can adjust the sounds to pronounce that word more accurately.
Vocabulary Strategies
- Idioms - expressions that cannot necessarily be understood by analyzing the meaning of each word in the expression. Idioms are one kind of expression. Other expressions that are widely used include adages and common sayings. An adage is a traditional expression that has been passed down from older generations and has been proven true by people's experiences. A common saying, such as a motto, is a well-known expression that usually offers advice or a comment on life in general. Unlike adages and sayings, an idiom is best understood as a chunk of language with one meaning. Context clues can help better understand all kinds of expressions.
Grammar
- Direct and Indirect Objects - the word that receives the action of the verb, or the word that tells to or for whom or what the action is done. Compound direct objects are words that receive the action of the same verb.
Writing
Write to Respond
- Focus Trait: Word Choice - writers must choose their words very carefully when writing poetry in order to make their poems meaningful and enjoyable to read. Alliteration is the repetition of the first sound in several words, and it is a tool used in poetry. Figurative language is language that compares two things that are quite different and that has a meaning beyond the literal meanings of its words. Writers use figurative language to create a colorful, more interesting image for readers.