Literary Element Lesson using Laura Candler's Literary Mood Ring

Hi all!  For those of you who blog.... I'm SO Impressed.  How do you all manage your time? I'm EXHAUSTED!  I find myself awake at night thinking of ways to improve my blog page.  I wanted to share a couple of websites and a lesson that I did with my students earlier in the week.  I used the book Thank You Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco. I think this is such a wonderful story to read to my students. We are able to talk about so many different issues such as bullying and various learning styles.  My idea was to use this story to discuss the "mood" of a story. After reading the story, I handed the students a copy of Laura Candler's literary mood ring.  You can access it here.Laura Candler's Mood Ring  It was perfect for helping my third graders with this literary element.  They could easily connect with a mood ring and the idea behind the "mood" of a story.   I also found a great link on Patricia Polacco's site to the story.  Students can send a postcard to a teacher.  I thought this would be a great thing to do during Teacher Appreciation Week.  The website is http://www.patriciapolacco.com/books/falker/falker_index.html

For you bloggers, I found a cool widget for the Common Core Standards from Laura Candler's website.  Here is her website: http://www.lauracandler.com/   Or you can just click on the widget on the far right corner of my blog and the info will be there.  The directions are very simple for applying it to your page.