Book Unit Yumminess

Ok, so here is the deal with book units...

There are several ways to implement them:
1) Pair books with the curriculum
        This is a great way to be able to reuse books every year because they are paired by grade.
        For example, when our district was using Houghton Mifflin Reading (HMR) one of the stories
        in the fourth grade curriculum was Heat Wave! by Helen Ketteman in their That's Amazing
        unit.  It is a story about how a heat wave affected a little girl's farm and caused corn to pop,
        cows to produce butter, etc.  We used the HMR story to introduce fantasy and paired it with
        Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Pickles to Pittsburgh. 

2) Create author units
        Last year we went to a TSHA presentation about author units and we LOVED it.  By using
        author units you can pick one author and do all of their books!!  So, if there is an author you
        really love, you can spend all year with him/her and maybe your kids will grow to love your
        author too.  :) You can do the same unit with all of your kids (or maybe do an author unit with
        your older kids and another author unit with your younger kids).  You will have to wait a few
        years for all of your kids to graduate to reuse the unit, but if you have several author units
        stored up, this should not be a problem.

3) Just because you love them lessons
        If there is book you just love and don't have a place for it in a unit, don't despair.  Do it
        anyway!! The kids don't care, or even notice some times what they are doing, they just want
        to be engaged.

An easy way to keep your lesson plans:
       This may sound crazy coming from someone who is starting a blog about lesson planning
       children's books, but I don't like to lesson plan.  Who does really?  (This is just from Nichole, I
       have no idea if Peyton likes to lesson plan or not so I cannot speak for her)  If you take some
       time to do it in advance, you don't have to worry about it during the school year.  Using large
       post-it notes, you can write your entire lesson plan down and just stick in the your book.  If
       you need something to do, grab a book and go.  You can also keep the extra materials for your
       book unit in your book so they are there as well.  Here are some examples: