On
line Chats with Your Favorite Authors
Online chats with REAL authors are so exciting!
Students can ask authors questions about the writing
process, books they've written, or even questions about what
encouraged them to become authors. Best of all, the
preparations required to participate in an on line chat
include a wide variety of language arts skills.
Students will need to read available biographies of the
author, information provided by the web site, and many of the
author's
works in order to be an informed chat participant.
Because most chats use a moderator who only submits some of
the posted questions to the author, those students who have
completed excellent research will be able to ask the best
questions and increase the likelihood of having their
questions submitted! Read the guidelines for chats on
Scholastic.com. by clicking on the books above.
Then click on the pencils at the left to go to Scholastic.com's
current Authors Online calendar.
Timelining
a Novel
To help students build their understanding of sequencing and
plot development, or to help them review
a book, story, or novel, you can program Timeliner
to
use chapters instead of years. Then challenge your
students to write one to three perfect summary sentences for
their assigned chapters of a book. Teams may type
their summaries in any order and Timeliner
will sort
them by the chapters entered and generate a timeline from
the first chapter to the last. Or, consider having
them create a timeline of the ways a character changes
throughout the course of a book. For each flag that
represents a change, have them write a paragraph (or
sentence, depending on the student's ability) that explains
what precipitated the new change in character. Click here
for additional
literacy projects
with Timeliner.
MAPPING
THE SETTING Make-a-Map 3D
or
Neighborhood Map Machine
are two
programs that are invaluable in helping students discover
how an author can paint a setting with words. Some
authors descibe settings so clearly that careful readers can
often create an actual map of the fictional surroundings
described. If the science or social studies standards for
your grade level include an understanding of various
eco-systems, you can include them as part of the mapping
challenge. Click on the map above to link to a
description of Neighborhood Map
Machine.
For a description of Make-A-Map
3D,
click the button to the right.
FACT-
LINK PROJECTS
Launch your students on real world research journeys to
investigate issues or factual information in fictional
books. Discerning fact from fiction builds excellent
reasoning and research skills as your students work to
complete these projects. Their writing skills will
also improve as they organize and present their research
data to their peers. One sample would be to have
students reading Charlotte's Web complete research to
discover what information provided about spiders in the book
is fact and what is fiction? One
group of students decided to investigate all the information
Charlotte presented to Wilbur and discover if it could be
verified in factual spider research works. They
presented their findings in a Spider Slide Show. Click
on the spider above to link to their project. (AIMS
Magazine,
volume XIV, January, 2000 just published a "Spider Spoofs
and Proofs" project that would complement this project
tremendously!)
FACT-
LINK POETRY PROJECTS
For those students who love poetry, you may consider linking
the concept of fiction-to-fact research to a poetry
project. The student on the right was captivated with
researching different species of penguins to discover which
species Admiral Drake actually sent to Mr. Popper in Mr.
Popper's Penguins. So, we teamed her up with a
fellow poetry lover and challenged them to write a rhyming poem about each
species (because they loved rhyming
poetry!). Then we asked if they could take the
greatest challenge of all and actually include five facts about each species
in the poems. They succeeded, typed the poems on the computer, and
printed them out on penguins they could color to represent
the appropriate species. The poems were so phenomenal that
we decided to laminate them too! (If you're ever reading Mr.
Popper's penguins and want to have students complete species
research, click on the girl above for an organizing
worksheet. You'll need the Adobe Acrobat Reader
plug-in from the home page.) Alyssa would especially
want you to know that a rhyming dictionary is the best tool
ever for authors writing rhyming poetry!
On
line Chats with Your Favorite Authors 
Timelining
a Novel 
review
a book, story, or novel, you can program 
MAPPING
THE SETTING 
FACT-
LINK PROJECTS 
FACT-
LINK POETRY PROJECTS 
1-5