The Great Kapok Tree - Guided Reading 5-lesson Unit

A Complete 5-lesson guided reading unit for the book ‘The Great Kapok Tree’ by Lynn Cherry. This unit focuses on quality activities that improve children’s key reading comprehension skills such as reading fluency, retrieval and inference. Suitable for lower Key Stage 2 or a mature Year 2 class. All lessons based around a 45-minute time slot but could easily be extended to an hour!

This pack contains a total of 5 lesson PowerPoints and a selection of worksheets.

Each lesson follows roughly the same format:

The lesson’s learning goal;
A summary starter that challenges children to summarise what they have read so far;
An inference starter - a short activity that engages the children’s inference skills.
A reading out loud challenge - get your students reading out loud by engaging in a short, fun activity that challenges their diction, reading fluency and expression.
Vocabulary pre-teaching - every lesson contains the key words to help all children access that lesson’s section of the book;
An activity to complete in books after that day’s reading.

Monday - This lesson acquaints the children with the text and challenges the children’s inference skills by asking them to draw and label a picture from the book’s description.
Tuesday - This lesson focuses on the skill of summarising and challenges the children to create succinct and effective summaries.
Wednesday - This lesson focuses on prediction and gets the children to write the last page of the story based solely on what they have previously read.
Thursday - This lesson analyses the author’s use of literary features and challenges children to identify key writing skills in a portion of the text. Answers are provided.
Friday - Having read the book, this lesson revisits the story and asks the children to consider the woodcutter’s feelings throughout the story by asking them to create an emotion graph after each page. This lesson in particular promotes many interesting discussions.