Jamaica Louise James Interactive Read-Aloud Activities

This picture book companion is a complete supplemental resource for the read-aloud book Jamaica Louise James by Amy Hest.

With 32 print-and-go reading activities to choose from, this resource is ideal for customizing learning to your student's specific needs and academic abilities. Students will investigate characters, identify story elements, determine the theme, sequence story events, compare & contrast, identify problems & solutions, make predictions, inferences, & connections, answer questions that require them to think beyond the text, and much more!

Students will love the engaging and fun activities, and you will appreciate the time saved hunting for high-level resources to teach reading concepts that students frequently struggle with. The activities provided are designed to enable students to apply higher-level thinking skills, encourage them to provide text evidence to support their thinking, and challenge them to express their own thoughts and/or perspectives.

⭐️This Resource Includes:⭐️

• Making Predictions: Before reading the book, students will make predictions about the text.

• Story Elements: Students fill in the boxes with words & pictures to represent the story elements.

• Sequencing: Students will retell & illustrate the important parts of the story.

• Summary: Students complete the Somebody, Wanted, Because, But, So graphic organizer and write a summary of the story.

• Recalling events in Chronological Order: Students describe and illustrate four major events in the story in chronological order.

• Story Event Sort: Students will describe a scene or event from the story that fits into each of the categories & explain how the event made them feel & how it relates to the category.

• Making Connections: Students make connections to an event from the story.

• Illustrating Inferences: Students read the text taken from the story, make inferences, and draw pictures to illustrate what they visualize.

• Making Inferences: Students use clues & schema to make inferences while reading the story.

• Character Traits: Students choose 2 important character traits that describe the main character and provide evidence from the text to support those traits.

• Character Inside & Out: Students include details from the story to describe what the character says, thinks, does, and feels.

• Character Feelings: Students describe how the character's feelings change throughout the story & give examples of the events that cause them to feel the way they do.

• Character Development: Students select the character traits that best describe the character at different times throughout the story and provide examples from the book to support each character trait.

• Character Change: Students will explain how the character changed from the beginning to the end of the story and describe the events that caused the change to happen.

• Character Summary: Students summarize the main character of the story.

• Sketch a Scene From the Story: Students will draw a scene from the story & explain why it's important.

• Setting Influences the Plot: Students will draw a scene from the story that takes place in one of the settings and write about what happened there and why it was important to the plot.

• Setting the Scene: Students identify three different settings in the story and explain how they know the setting changed.

• Author's Message: Students describe four important events from the story and put them in chronological order. Then, answer the questions about the author's message.

• Theme: Students answer the questions to determine which theme best fits the story and provide text evidence to support their choice.

• 3-2-1: Students will describe three things they learned about Jamaica’s character while reading the story, give two examples of what Jamaica didn’t like about the subway station, and describe Jamaica using only one word with supporting evidence.

• Thinking About the Text: Students will answer the questions about the story & include examples from the text to support their answers.

• Thinking Beyond the Text: Students will answer the questions about the story & include examples from the text to support their answers.

• Before & After: Students will describe and illustrate what the subway station looked like before Jamaica Louise James had her big idea and what it looked like after.

• Doing Our Favorite Things: Students draw Jamaica Louise James doing her favorite thing and draw themselves doing their favorite thing.

• Jamaica’s Story: Students will write a story that Jamaica might tell her family and friends about her painting on page 6.

• Wait... There's More!: Students will write about what happens next in the story.

• Book Review: Students rate and review the book.

• Compare & Contrast: Students compare the books Jamaica Louise James and The Gardener.

• My Cool Idea: Students write about a cool idea they have to make someone's world more beautiful. and draw a picture to go with their writing.

• Spruce Up the Space (4 different spaces are included): Students will Improve a space like Jamaica did in the story.

• Community Project Flyer: Students create a flyer for a community service opportunity that will persuade others to help or improve something in their community.

This resource is for extension read-aloud activities only. The book is not included.