Showing posts with label cause and effect. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cause and effect. Show all posts

Monday, March 25, 2013

A Place For Turtles


A Place for Turtles
by Melissa Stewart
illustrated by Higgins Bond
Peachtree, 2013
review copy provided by the pubisher

There is so much to love about this book.

From the moment you open the cover, there is information. The endpapers have maps of a dozen North American turtles and their ranges.

The main text, across the top of a gorgeous two-page illustration, is brief and accessible.

On the first spread, we are given the thesis of the book. The structure of the text is identifiably problem/solution or cause/effect: "Turtles make our world a better place. But sometimes people do things that make it hard for them to live and gro. If we work together to help these special creatures, there will always be a place for turtles."

The main text of very spread gives the main idea of one human-caused problem and its solution. In the sidebar information, the problem is explained in more detail (including more information about the affected species of turtle) as well as what humans are doing to rectify the problems they've caused for the turtles.

We are getting ready to start nonfiction writing and research in my 5th grade language arts classes. Every topic won't lend itself to a cause/effect structure, but this will be the book I use as a mentor text for that structure.

On a side note...how did I miss this series, A Place For...? Stewart and Bond have books about bats, butterflies, frogs, and birds. I'm off to the library to check them out, and then perhaps to the bookstore!



Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Cause and Effect -- a poem


CAUSE AND EFFECT

Someone stole
my teacher.
They took my
favorite one.

She helped me 
patiently,
she was cheerful
and great fun.

She's replaced 
by a big
meany who is
giving me more work.

Do you think
this could have happened
'cause the class just went
berserk?

© Mary Lee Hahn, 2012


Poem #24, National Poetry Month, 2012

It was one of those days...



Cathy, at Merely Day By Day, is joining me in a poem a day this month. Other daily poem writers include Amy at The Poem Farm, Linda at TeacherDance, Donna at Mainely Write, Laura at Writing the World for Kids (daily haiku), Liz at Liz in Ink (daily haiku), Sara at Read Write Believe (daily haiku), Jone at Deo Writer (daily haiku)...and YOU?