Trust Me, Jack's Beanstalk Stinks!

If you haven't seen this book yet, you've got to check it out:

There are three other books in the series, too.  They tell familiar fairytales from another character's point of view.  In this case, the giant is telling his side of the story.  I read my students the original fairytale first (I was surprised that most of my students had never heard the fairytale before).  Then, I read them this version.   They LOVED it and thought it was so funny!  After reading it, I gave them a quiz with questions just like the kind we will see on our state testing:

They appreciated that we at least got to read a fun story in order to practice some test-taking ;)  Next, we worked together to think of some ideas to compare and contrast the two versions of the story:

Then, students added more of their own ideas onto their own graphic organizers:

We then learned some sentence starters for taking the information from our graphic organizers to write in paragraph form.  We used this anchor chart to help:

Tomorrow, the kids will write their compare/contrast paragraphs in their writing notebooks, revise and edit, and then write their final copies on this paper:

To use these ideas in your own class, plus for many other activities that go with this book, check out my Trust Me, Jack's Beanstalk Stinks! unit.  It's a fun way to practice reading and writing skills at this point in the year that can seem to drag a bit!