This weeklong cross-curricular novel study for the book Horrible Harry & the Holidaze is sure to engage readers while teaching them about a variety of customs and traditions associated with winter holidays around the world.
As a realistic fiction novel, Horrible Harry & the Holidaze offers a great unit for teaching about major holidays celebrated in winter. Students work on reading comprehension skills while learning key vocabulary and important facts about holidays like Three Kings Day, Christmas, Kwanzaa, Lunar New Year, and Hanukkah.
The foldable format is approachable and engaging to prevent overwhelm. Instead of spending hours on long responses, the trifolds guide students to get to the heart of the reading and spend time really understanding the text and associated social studies concepts.
Your download includes:
✔Daily reading comprehension activities, vocabulary, and holiday-related prompts available in a student-friendly trifold format aligned with the book Horrible Harry & the Holidaze
✔ Easy-to-follow directions for printing and prep
✔ Instructional planning guide
In this Novel Unit for Horrible Harry & the Holidaze you'll find:
1) Student comprehension practice (up to 5 instructional days)
- Each day's work focuses on a single standards-based comprehension skill
- Short, written responses include opportunities to apply thinking to text
- Designed with reluctant and struggling learners in mind
- Built-in graphic organizers to support skill acquisition
- Approachable questions help make connections & start conversations
- No boring multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank questions!
2) Approachable practice with key reading standards and skills including:
- Text analysis and author's purpose
- Exploring how character traits are modeled through action and dialogue
- Making inferences and drawing conclusions based on text clues
- Analyzing problems and solutions
- Generating a summary of key events
- Examining cause & effect relationships
- And so much more!
3) Connections to global traditions associated with winter holidays, including Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Three Kings Day, & Lunar New Year
- Text-based & holiday-related vocabulary
- Understanding where, when, and how each holiday is celebrated
- Connecting to geographical regions where the holiday is prominent
- and a short writing prompt related to the holidays included
4) Teacher support materials
- Unit scope & sequence lays out the day's comprehension & vocabulary focus
- Answer Keys for all comprehension activities
- Tips for preparation and implementation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
How Novel Units from Differentiated Teaching Work...
▸ Teachers can introduce the day's vocabulary word & discuss before reading.
▸ Students complete just one section of the trifold or a single Google Slide each day.
▸ Daily work focuses on target skills needed for success in reading vs. plot recall.
▸ The low-pressure format provides novelty & encourages student engagement
▸ Less overwhelming to reluctant readers and writers
▸ Requires deep analysis and application of text-based knowledge
▸ Encourages discussion about skills & strategies
Here's why teachers love these novel units...
♥ We used these for a whole-class novel study. Pre-printed brochures fully encompassed ELA skills for the novel. This is an extremely easy, but very rich set of activities for understanding and enriching student's ELA skills. I will be using this for our first novel study again in class this fall. I highly recommend this! -Allison M.
♥ This has helped me so much in teaching Holes to my students this year. Other resources overwhelm students with too much vocabulary and literal comprehension questions but these slides give students one vocabulary word for each chapter and a grade-level higher-order comprehension skill to practice. - Kristin P.
♥ This does a really good job of focusing on vocab and using context clues, practicing quoting from the text, and target skills. I really liked the way it focused on one skill for every two chapters, which made things really manageable for my students. - Beth A.
Here's what homeschool families have to say about the novel studies...
★ I LOVE the layout and how it guides my son and I through our reading time. As a homeschool parent, I still wanted to give him that opportunity to discuss and grapple with the text and I love this quick format as a brochure. I also love the vocab focus for each section and the skill listed so I can monitor his understanding of these as we move through a variety of texts this year. - Antonia S.
★ I am a homeschool mom and my daughter is enjoying the book and I am loving that she is able to respond to the reading through various aspects and not just answering questions. She is more engaged in her reading and asking more questions after she completes each task. - Terri B.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Terms of Use:
© Rebecca Davies. All rights reserved by the author. These materials are intended for personal use by a single classroom only. Copying for more than one teacher, classroom, department, school, or school system is prohibited. For use in multiple classrooms, please purchase additional licenses. This product may not be distributed or displayed digitally for public view. Failure to comply is a copyright infringement and a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Clipart and elements found in this PDF are copyrighted and cannot be extracted and used outside of this file without permission or license. See product file for clip art and font credits.
