Summer Ball

By Mr. McAuliffe and Mrs. Young
 

Throughout the cold and blustery months of January and February, Mr. McAuliffe’s and Mrs. Young’s students were enjoying the novel Summer Ball written by Mike Lupica. As a class we opened our unit by reading and analyzing the elements of a realistic fiction. Next we constructed a checklist indicating all of the elements of a realistic fiction. Then we worked in small cooperative groups and discussed the various characters in the story, made predictions and connected the text to other tales we have read. We designed an ongoing list of curious and interesting questions along with important vocabulary words. We developed authentic journal responses to various prompts throughout our unit.

As an added bonus we decided to produce a short play of Summer Ball. Therefore, we have transformed a few chapters from the novel into a screenplay and have practiced our roles daily. Finally, we constructed business letters that were addressed directly to Mr. Lupica, explaining how much we enjoyed the novel, our activities in class, and we invited him to view our own production of Summer Ball.  We will be performing our version of Summer Ball in the near future!

We have begun our Patricia Polacco unit and soon to follow that is the Titanic. We will have a summary of those units in the final edition of Cottage Lane Express.

Go Team Mickey!!!!