Can I Borrow A FRINDLE?

What is this?

"A pen", you may say?

WRONG!!!

It's a FRINDLE!

That's what my students keep reminding me, anyway! Everytime I say, "Ok, gt out your red pens" I an met with a chorus of outrage: "Not pen...FRINDLE!" :)
If you couldn't guess, we just finished our first read-aloud, Frindle by Andrew Clements.

Scholastic Synopsis: Fifth grader Nick Allen knows just how to make school more cool . In third grade, he transformed Miss Deaver's room into a tropical paradise with some paper palm trees and a sandy beach. In fourth grade, he taught his classmates to mimic the high-pitched calls of blackbirds. But now, in fifth grade, he's come up with his most ingenious idea yet. After learning about the origins of words, he decides to change the word pen to frindle . At first, it seems like a harmless prank, a way to annoy his dictionary-obsessed teacher. Then the whole class starts using the new word, and the joke spreads across town like wildfire. Suddenly Nick finds himself in the middle of a media frenzy over frindle. Will Nick emerge from the controversy a troublemaker or a hero?

One of my favorite things that I've TRIED in the classroom is...
Read-alouds!

I read aloud to my students every day.
Yes, my fifth grade students.
The "big kids" who sometimes have that "too-cool-for-school" attitude.
They love it when I read to them.
Gone are the days when mom and dad would snuggle in bed and read them a bedtime story.
But they still enjoy being read to.
And it gives me the valuable opportunity to model fluency, 
vocabulary searching, 
critical thinking skills, 
character development, 
and summarizing.
It's a win-win-win-win...well, you get the picture :)

After we finished the book, we completed a couple of exercises together: I introduced the "Someone...wanted...but...so" summarizing model:

And then we did a Character Profile on the main character, Nick:

We differentiated between physical traits and character traits.

Then, we took a turn at creating new words, just like Nick!

I put all of the "new words" together in a class book:

These activities (and TONS more!) can be found in a mega packet
I've created to accompany a novel study of the book:

The MEGA packet is 40 pages long, chocked-full of of activities for before, during, and after reading that can serve as comprehension assessment, writing prompts, and/or valuable practice determining different story elements:

Here's a preview of some of pages included:

You can snag it in my TpT store
for only $5!

And, to thank my faithful blog readers for their loyalty  I would like to GIVE AWAY A FREE COPY! If you'd like a chance to win, enter the Rafflecoptor below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway