For this course, it was required for us to read the book Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White. Based on chapters one through four of the book, I created an activity that can be used in a fifth-grade classroom. The activity is an exercise where students are supposed to match quotes from the book to the names of the characters who said them. There are seven quotes and seven characters to choose from. I included small photos of the drawings by Garth Williams present in the book in order to help the children remember who the characters are. The students will read each of the quotes carefully in order to figure out which character said them. There are letters placed next to the characters’ names, and the students will write them in a space provided next to each of the quotes to easily identify which characters said each quote. This activity was created to be used after reading the first four chapters of the book, and its purpose is to help the students recall important material from the text, such as dialogue and characters’ names.

 

      I chose to focus on the skill of inference making for my mini lesson. The activity I created serves as an aid for effectively teaching this skill for more than one reason. First, if the students cannot recall which character said a certain quote from memory, they will have to re-read the quote carefully and use context clues to be able figure out the correct answer. If they still are not able to figure out the answer based solely on the quotes provided, they can look at the pictures of the characters and infer which character is most likely to have said a specific quote based on their appearance, clothing, objects they may be holding, etc.

 

     This activity is sure to engage students and motivate them to learn because it will inspire them to use their memory and imagination to be able to figure out the correct answers. Also, the worksheet is structured in a way that makes the exercise look like a game. This will make the students think the exercise is fun, which will make them want to continue learning the concepts and skills covered without complaint. When I was in elementary school, I completed many exercises similar to this one, but none of them included pictures. I would have loved to have pictures to look at when completing an exercise like this one, so I decided to include them for my worksheet, which makes it creative and unique compared to other similar ones. I believe that this will also contribute to making the experience more aesthetically pleasing for students.

 

     One of the challenges I faced during the creation process of my mini lesson and activity, was selecting the quotes that would be most suitable for use in the exercise. During the first four chapters of Charlotte’s Web, we are just beginning to meet the characters. Due to this, the students may not know them very well yet, so I had to make sure to select quotes that stood out from the rest of the text so the students could remember them with more ease. Also, even though many characters are introduced in the first four chapters, not all of them have many memorable lines of dialogue at this point in the book. Thus, I had to narrow down the list to the seven characters which I considered to be more remarkable in these chapters.

 

     Even though I consider my final product to be good, there is room for improvement. Technology is not my strong suit, so the worksheet I created was probably not as nice-looking as it could have been. While I do think I did a good job with the overall structure of the worksheet, it could have probably looked better if I had used a more advanced program to create it. This would allow the pictures to look prettier and more even next to the characters’ names.

 

     All in all, I would say I had a good experience creating this project. I had never read the book Charlotte’s Web before and, as a fan of classical literature, I loved it. Precisely, one of the things I enjoyed the most about the book was the memorable quotes, so getting to re-read them in the first four chapters to be able to complete my activity was very fun for me. I learned a lot through this process and hope to be able to implement exercises like this in my future classroom, whether it is using Charlotte’s Web or another book.

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