One of the most common struggles teachers face is tackling TIME. There simply isn’t enough of it to cover all the skills and standards we need to teach! One way to address this problem is to integrate as much as possible. Being able to address multiple skills and standards through one or two lessons truly helps maximize time as well as often helping the students to practice true application.
In this post, I will share tips, lessons, and even free activities you can use to integrate science, reading, writing, and grammar with the book, Come On, Rain! by Karen Hesse. **affiliate link- Amazon gives me a couple cents when you use this link and I use that money to help pay for my giveaways!**
First, I have to brag on the illustrations of the book. They are watercolor sensations! It’s easy to get “stuck” in the comprehension of the text as teachers and forget about the pictures… but it is important to “read” the pictures as well!
And of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out the BEAUTIFUL figurative language and imagery throughout the text. This is definitely a great book to use when teaching about these skills, as well as writing in prose.
Students can “collect” the awesome adjectives and vivid verbs from the book as you read- making a list they can refer to later for their own writing.
Then of course, focus on how to use that figurative language and those vivid verbs during mentor sentence time!
If you teach about weather, this is a great mentor text to use to discuss a bit of science- yes even though it’s fiction! There are clues Karen Hesse gives in the text that show a rainstorm is coming, like the gray clouds rolling in and the wind picking up…
And if you teach about fronts and forecasting, a fun writing prompt I always did with my kids is to have them pretend to be the meteorologist on the news forecasting Tessie and Mamma’s weather! And of course, you can also discuss the drought that is occuring in the book, too.
There are some fantastic vocabulary words that the students will be able to learn and understand through context clues… and also look at the words’ parts of speech. Sometimes, words that can be verbs are also adjectives!
Talk about how you can tell these words are adjectives or verbs based on how they are used in the sentence.
This is definitely a “don’t miss” book. If you would like the print-and-go activities pictured in this post, you can get the entire mentor text unit in my TpT store!
Looking for ready-made explicit mentor text lessons for the week?
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