Not very fancy: My Students Just Loved Snot!*

*Snot is one of the characters in Doreen Cronin's book Boom, Snot, Twitty.

I found this book by accident when I was looking for some of Doreen Cronin's other books, and I'm glad I did! This book is perfect for character analysis.

Boom, Snot, Twitty is the story of 3 friends, a bear, a snail, and a bird. They are spending the day together. The book tells about how each character responds to the events of the day.

I read this book to my class 3 times. (And there were no complaints!) The first time we just enjoyed it. It was interesting how the kids immediately began gravitating toward a character. My class was about an even split between identifying with Boom (the bear) and Snot (the snail).

The second time I read it, I had the kids use their white boards to take notes. I showed them how to make a table with each name in it. Their first challenge was to listen for things each character said. They recorded as we went through the book. I paused a few times, but didn't give them guidance. At the end I wrote down some of the things they'd heard the characters say. We repeated this process with the kids recording what the characters did. A nice feature of the book is that the things the characters say and do are very concise.

Once we had lists of things each character said and did, we tried to draw conclusions about the way that each character felt.

To wrap the lesson up, I asked them questions like, "Which character is your mom the most like?" and "Do you know anyone who is like Twitty?" "In what way are they like Twitty?"

It was a really good discussion!

I'm linking this post with Andrea at Reading Toward the Stars. Book Talk Thursday is one of my favorite linkups! Other books I've written about include The Cat, the Dog, the Exploding Eggs, the Wolf, and Grandma, Spoon, and Sneezy the Snowman.

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