The Barn Owls Interactive Read-Aloud Activities

This picture book companion is a complete supplemental resource for the book The Barn Owls by Tony Johnston.

With 41 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 identify story elements, determine the theme, analyze elements of poetry, compare and contrast, make predictions, inferences, and connections, answer questions that require them to think within and beyond the text, and so 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 (ANSWER KEY INCLUDED).

• 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.

• Comic Recall: Students will draw three scenes from the story, complete with speech bubbles, to tell the story's beginning, middle, and end with text and illustrations.

• 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.

• Sketch a Scene From the Story: Students will illustrate one of the events from the story and explain why this event is important to the plot.

• 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.

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

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

• Visualizing: Students will read the sentences from the story and draw a picture of the images they visualized.

• Sensory Details: Students write a detailed description of the barn using all five senses.

• 3-2-1: Students describe three things that happen in the old barn year after year, name two facts they learned about barn owls, and choose one word that best describes the barn and explain why.

• 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.

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

• Day Owl, Night Owl: Students will draw two scenes: one showing what barn owls do during the day and another for nighttime.

• Alliteration: Students underline the letters that create alliteration in the poem, fill in the blanks to create alliteration, and write their own alliteration sentence (ANSWER KEY included).

• 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.

• Crossword Puzzle: Students use clues & the word bank to fill in the puzzle (ANSWER KEY INCLUDED).

• Word Search Puzzle: Students use the clues to fill in the puzzle (ANSWER KEY INCLUDED).

• Barn Owl ABCs: Students write words or phrases that begin with each letter of the alphabet to show what they learned about barn owls.

• Personification: Students identify personification in the text, specify what's being personified, describe the human trait or action assigned to the non-human element, and elucidate the author's purpose for using personification (ANSWER KEY included).

• Book Review: Students will rate and review the book.

• Personification Poem Brainstorm: Students choose something related to the story to personify and brainstorm imagery around noun and verb word pairs.

• Personification Poem: Students will write and illustrate their personification poem.

• Haiku Poem Planning Sheet: Students will choose a topic or object that relates to the story, brainstorm ideas using the five senses, and list adjectives to describe the topic or object.

• Haiku Poem Template: Students will write and illustrate their Haiku poem.

• Cinquain Poem: Students will write a Cinquain poem about something related to owls.

• Barn Owl Diagram: Students label the parts of a barn owl (ANSWER KEY INCLUDED).

• Barn Owl Adaptations Match Up: Students match up the barn owl adaptations to the reasons why they're important for their survival (ANSWER KEY INCLUDED).

Research Activities: Students or teachers can choose from the following activities and graphic organizers to use while researching to learn more about owls.

• KWL graphic organizer

• Barn Owls - CAN - HAVE -ARE

• Barn Owls - WHO - WHAT -WHERE - HOW

• Fun Facts About Barn Owls

• New Vocabulary

• Barn Owl Research Report: key points, picture, and summary

• Barn Owl Research One-Page Report: Students research to learn more about barn owls and complete a one-page report with facts regarding the habitat, features, diet, movement, and interesting facts.

• Owl Roll & Research: Students roll a die to see what type of owl species they will learn more about. Then, they research owls using teacher-approved websites and informational texts to look for information to answer the questions.

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