Chocolate Fever Weeks 2 and 3

We continued reading Chocolate Fever in weeks 2 and 3. Throughout the second and third week, students made trifolds/brochures to practice their comprehension skills. After reading chapter 7, students had to design a new book cover, which was the front of the trifold. After reading chapter 8, students wrote the setting and described the characters from the chapter. After reading chapter 9, students wrote the BME (plot). After reading chapter 10, students wrote their prediction for how the story would end and why they felt that way.

Also, before finishing the last two chapters, students put on their medical hats and wrote a prescription for Henry Green! They enjoyed pretending to be doctors. I loved seeing the "cures" that they came up with.

After the story, students gave the book a rating, wrote about their favorite part from the story and finished the trifold with a review.

We also wrote about the message/moral of the story in our interactive notebooks.


I absolutely love doing novel studies because 1) they are engaging 2)you can cover so many different skills and 3) You can celebrate when it's finished! Which leads me to the chocolate party...


Many of you asked if I was crazy. Trust me, by the end of the day, I felt like a crazy person!

It was definitely worth it though... the kids loved every second! My goal is to do one more novel study before the end of the year.

Chocolate Fever fun!

We are on the third week of our very first novel study, Chocolate Fever. 

This book is perfect for the skills we've been covering the past two weeks, plot and theme, and is filled with tons of rich vocabulary. Before we read each chapter,  we record "juicy" words in our vocab books. We learn the meaning, come up with synonyms, and draw a picture that will help us remember the word's meaning. Going over the words before we read them in the chapter helps students to understand the word when they see it in context. They also get excited to see the words as they read! 

During the first week we focused on writing the plot of the chapters. I modeled this a lot for the students before they practiced with partners. 

We're reading this novel in whole group, with partners and independently. There is always an activity to accompany the end of each chapter. 

Probably my favorite activity so far was making a self-to-text connection with our very own book cover! After coming up with their very own "fever" they made their cover and then a little snapshot of their pretend book. They wrote about the supporting characters, the illness, the cure, and the setting. They absolutely loved making these! 

For the second half of the book, we are making "brochures" outlining the characters, setting, plot, vocabulary and at the end students will give the book a rating, write a review and a note to the reader. These are done independently or with partners. This is showing me they can apply what we've practiced the past two weeks. 

On Thursday we will wrap up our novel unit with a chocolate celebration! I'm sure this will be a huge hit!

Opinion Writing

Before spring break, we spent two weeks working on how to formally write an opinion piece. My goal for the students was to have them learn to state an opinion using academic language and to supply reasons that supported their opinion.

On the first day we brainstormed different activities that we could do at recess. Pairs of students each took an acitivity and came up with reasons why that activity was the best thing to do at recess. The students then wrote a paragraph choosing one recess activity and giving reasons why they like it. My goal for the first day was to introduce the concept and emphasize the need to state an opinion and supply reasons. Those terms were nailed in over and over throughout the lesson and writing.

On day two, I introduced students to using sentence frames to state an opinion. Since this was their first day working with the sentence frames, I kept it simple and stuck to these sentence frames. I required that students used these frames, at least for that day. We then did some whole group practice using the frames and a partner practice game. The prompt strips were on one color and the sentence frames were on another colored piece of paper. The student with the prompt paper asked the question and the student with the sentence frame paper responded. After asking and answering, students switched papers and found a new partner. They had such fun with this game!

We ended day two with an easy prompt: their favorite food. We did a quick web and I sent students off to write their opinion paragraph. I emphasized that they had to state their opinion using a sentence frame and give three reasons.

On day three, students sorted opinions and reasons. We first sorted the strips of paper into opinion and reason, then we matched the reason to the correct opinion. This was challenging! After an independent practice with sorting, students chose one opinion and reason pair. They wrote that opinion and reason in their spiral and wrote two more reasons to go with that opinion. This was great practice because they had to use some higher-level writing.

We repeated this series of activities with each component of the opinion paragraph, including using linking verbs and transition words (NOT BEGINNING A SENTENCE WITH AND OR BECAUSE, WHICH DRIVES ME CRAZY!), a topic sentence, and a closing sentence.

By the end of the two weeks, I could really see the students writing develop. As an assessment, they were given a topic and a rubric and they had to write a formal opinion piece, making sure to include all of the elements of an opinion paragraph.