One Book...Multiple Lessons

Hello everyone!  I'm back today to share another favorite book (and I think I like this one even more than the Hungry Thing).  Lately I'm loving Dear. Mrs. LaRue: Letters from Obedience School.  It's about a naughty dog, Ike, who is sent to obedience school.  Ike writes letters daily to his owner trying to convince her to let him come back, and then he ends up escaping.  This story has so many potential teaching points. 

Here's some ideas I came up (and the list isn't limited to this).

-Different perspectives (between the dog and the illustrations).
-Character analysis: What is Ike like?  A lot of my students came up with the word dramatic.  The obedience school really didn't seem so bad according to the pictures.
-Compare and Contrast: Compare what Ike writes to the illustrations.
-Inferencing: The ending of the story is perfect for this.
-Patterns in text

And there are writing connections too!
-Writing a friendly letter
-Persuasion: Ike is good at this!  Possible prompt: If you were Mrs. LaRue, what would you do?  Would you let Ike out early? Why or why not?

And for phonics we really worked on the vowel digraph spellings for _ue (LaRue) as well as o, oo, ew, u, and others.