A Year Down Yonder

What we finished reading:  Last week we finished reading A Year Down Yonder.  It is a sweet squeal to A Long Way from Chicago.  This book is about Mary Alice spending a year at her grandmother's house in the country.  It takes place during the Great Depression and tells the tale of Mary Alice changing in a year.  

This website has a list of fun ideas.  I would have loved to do their suggestion of writing letters back and forth between Mary Alice and her brother/family.  We just don't have enough students in our little class of 3 to do that project.

The project we ended up making was a group calendar.  Each chapter of the novel breaks down what happened in a particular month of the year.  The boys each took two months to illustrate.  They wrote on the back what Mary Alice learned through that chapter.  They struggled a little with the writing part.  They wanted to just write a summary of the chapter, but I challenged them to take it a step deeper and write what the main character learned.

How are you pushing your students to think deeper?

Con mucho amor.