Mentor Text Linky: Amos & Boris with free resources!

This is my first time linking up with Collaborative Cuties for their Mentor Text Linky, so I'm pretty excited! I read all the fabulous book recommendations each Sunday and always think, "Man, I should write a post!" and then yeah.. I go back to sitting on the coach being a lazy bum. BUT--my lesson plans this week lend perfectly to this so I'm sharing!

Before leaving for Christmas break, my team and I decided to read Amos & Boris starting the week of January 6th (tomorrow--super sad face!). It came with our reading series as a trade book, meaning EVERY KID IN MY CLASS GETS THEIR OWN COPY. I, like most true teachers, put off my planning until the weekend before. So, Thursday night I sat at my computer (from 9PM-2AM) and did the logical/lazy thing--googled the book to see what resources I could find and therefore would not have to create myself. The first beautiful piece of information I came upon was this... a PDF file with vocabulary words, text dependent questions, standards to teach with, among other amazingness. This file got my brain working!

Here is the description provided by Amazon:

Amos the mouse and Boris the whale: a devoted pair of friends with nothing at all in common, except good hearts and a willingness to help their fellow mammal. They meet after Amos sets out to sail the sea and finds himself in extreme need of rescue. And there will come a day, long after Boris has gone back to a life at sea and Amos has gone back to life on dry land, when the tiny mouse must find a way to rescue the great whale.

This book is said to be for grades 2-3, but can be used in upper grades 4-5 easily because of the rich vocabulary. Seriously, some of these words are insane and add great value to this super cute, RICH story. My focus for this week is describing characters (traits, motivations and feelings) based on what they say or do in the text, and how that contributes to the sequence of events. I created a few pages to use as resources for myself and am offering to guys for free if ya want! Click here to be taken to be Google Drive to grab the freebie or on any of the pictures below!

Just to be clear, I created the graphic organizer and the original text that supports determining character traits, along with the accompanying questions, but DID NOT actually write all of the text dependent questions on the task cards below. Those I got straight from the website I shared, I just typed them up.

We will be describing both Amos and Boris using this easy graphic organizer. Once my students are familiar with this process, they will then describe a character from another text to ensure they got it. 

There are 5 pages of questions, meaning 20 questions total. I printed these out, cut them out, and have students work in groups/pairs to answer on their own notebook paper--in complete sentences. I will be pulling some of my special friends to work through these with me. 

One thing I like to do with any skill I teach is show my students how future end of the year testing questions may look, in relation to that skill AND how to go back IN THE TEXT to find the answers. So, I whipped up this one page text with 4 questions asking students to decide their character traits. An answer key is included. 

I hope you can find this useful! Go link up with Collaborative Cuties to share your great finds!