Brave Irene
by William Steig
Lesson plans and teaching resources
This slide show guides reading with emphasis on personification, context clues, cause and effect, character analysis. Includes writing task.
Teaching resources include a video of former Vice President Al Gore reading the story aloud and
, including discussion questions, printable handouts for identifying story elements, writing, research, and related links and titles. The video runs 14:00 and resides at YouTube. The additional activities require Adobe Reader for access.
A list of 10 vocabulary words and definitions.
This lesson emphasizes character analysis/mapping.
This extensive unit includes uses
Brave Irene
to determine theme in Lesson Plan Four.
This lesson uses trading cards to support students' literacy development in planning for writing. Using an interactive trading cards tool, students first explore the way that the questions on it apply to a character in a familiar story. Students then use the tool to plan a character's development. An extension for this lesson is to have students use these cards to write their own stories. Includes links to online resources.
Students use descriptive language to clarify ideas and create vivid images in an essay. Includes printable student handouts.
Students create a sentence about weather using an online sentence generator (included). After manipulating and illustrating the sentence, they write a longer story or description using the sentence as inspiration. Emphasis is on learning to move adverbs and prepositional phrases around in sentences to craft more fluent and more interesting writing.
Teacher models making a web using descriptive words. Students listen to the story
Brave Irene
. Teacher passes out a list of the descriptive words used in the book, and students create a vocabulary word web using one of the descriptive words from the text. Includes printable graphic organizer.