Predicting with a Mystery

Last week our Treasures reading skill was to practice predicting what was going to happen in the story. I love Treasures and the way it is laid out but sometimes I give it a little more of a flare to go with our theme of the week. Thank goodness my district allows this because I read blogs where teachers don't have as much freedom. I believe the curriculum should be your guideline but it doesn't have to be the "be all end all."

All that being said....I started off my lesson by showing my students the cover of....

We then talked about the little girl Annie and how she has lost her mitten. She then has to retrace her steps of the day to find where she may have dropped it. We brainstormed ideas together based on just looking at the cover where Annie will find her mitten. Several of my students picked up on the huge hint on the cover of the story but a few didn't.

After we brainstormed ideas as a group, I gave each student a mitten to write their prediction for where Annie was going to find her mitten. Then we enjoyed the story together and were very happy to see that Annie finds her mitten..... (Nope! Not going to tell  you where she finds it. You need to read the book to find out!)

I gave the students another mitten afterwards for the students to write about whether their prediction was correct or not. We talked about how sometimes we think we know what is going to happen and that it doesn't always work out that way. Then we also went back to look at the clues in the story to see how maybe we can make a more correct prediction in the story next time.