The Worst Band in the Universe by Graeme Base

While doing this author unit I was introduced to several new Graeme Base books.  This one is a favorite!  How could aliens, music, and gak go wrong? 

Some activities to do with this book:

**SMART Technology:  Our district provides air slates with SMART technology and it is periodically fun to do the lessons on that.  The kids love using the air slate to maneuver the words and write.  This is one such time so if you have those capabilities, here is the entire lesson for you ready to go!

Get your SMART Technology lesson here!

For those of you who don't have SMART technology, here is a list of activities for you...

1) Predicting and Drawing Inferences:  This book has some incredible language (both real and completely made up) so you will have to constantly go back and check for understanding while reading it.  It normally takes about three thirty minute sessions to get through the book, but that is OK because you are doing so much while you read.  Every couple of stanzas you should go back and ask what is happening.  Your kids will have to use their skills of drawing inferences to understand what is going on.  There are also some great parts of the books that are good for making predictions.

**If you have older kids this book has some great historical tie ins.  The underground music venue in Sector 9 could be compared to a Speak Easy from Prohibition and the Musical Inquisitor with his "wanting to create a pure musical world" and his ProdMen could be compared to Hitler and his Nazis.

2) Story Mapping:  With Uno's Garden, we sequenced the story by page and retold it using transition words.  Now we are using a story map.  Before completing the map, it is important to teach what each part of the map is.  There are tons of maps out there but here is one I created when I was first starting out if you want another one for your arsenal.  You can then use your completed map with the transition words from Uno's Garden to retell the story.

Get your Story Map here!

3)  Vocabulary:  Like I said before, great language in this book.  I picked out a ton of words to go over and wrote them in the sentence they came from so you can teach understanding vocabulary words based on context clues.  This activity could be done while you are reading because they are separated by page, but I just waited and went through all of the words at once using the air slate.  When I got to each new page, we talked about what was happening in the story so we were doing more retelling as we went.

Get your Vocabulary Matching activity here!

4)  Comparing and Contrasting:  You can compare and contrast Blipp and Squaag as well as Sprocc and Skat or Sprocc and the Musical Inquisitor.  Use the "during words" to create sentences like with Uno's garden but this time try it without the visuals.

5)  Gak:  Like I said earlier, I love to do cooking activities at the end of each book to work on following directions.  This time we made gak!!  It is made with glue and Borax so, of course, it is not to be eaten, but the kids loved it.  They especially loved mixing the solution with their hands.  An added bonus was getting to take it home.  My 6th graders even went back to class and explained how to make it to their science teacher.

Get your Recipe here!