Trailblazer: Ballerina Raven Wilkinson Book Companion Activities | Black History

Item description

This picture book companion is a complete supplemental resource for Leda Schubert’s book, Trailblazer: The Story of Ballerina Raven Wilkinson.

With 40 print-and-go reading activities to choose from, this resource is ideal for customizing learning to your student’s specific needs and academic ability.

Students will investigate characters, identify story elements, determine the theme, conduct research, read text and illustrations, practice plotting story events, analyze characters, make predictions & connections, respond to questions related to the story, and much more!

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It’s the ideal interactive read-aloud for educating students about the ballerina Raven Wilkinson, equality, resilience, passion, dedication, standing up for what you believe in, hope, unity, and so much more! It’s a great addition to units on black history, women in history, the civil rights movement, influential people in history, or biographies. 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.

This Resource Includes:

• Making Predictions – Before reading the book, students will examine the front cover and describe what they see, make predictions about what the book is about, and the questions they think the book might answer.
• Story Elements – Students fill in the boxes with words and pictures to represent the story elements.
• Summarizing – Students complete the Somebody, Wanted, Because, But, So graphic organizer and write a summary of the story.
• Cause & Effect – 4 differentiated versions are included. (ANSWER KEY INCLUDED).
• Setting Influences the Plot – Students will answer the questions about the setting of the story to gain a better understanding of how a story’s setting helps to build the narrative’s mood, plot, and character development.
• Story Plot – Students organize the events of the story on the graphic organizer (ANSWER KEY INCLUDED).
• Timeline of Events – Students will cut and paste the “Timeline Sequencing Cards” in the correct order onto the timeline (ANSWER KEY included).
• Character Inside & Out – Students include details from the story to describe what the character says, thinks, does, and feels.
• Character Traits – 3 differentiated versions are included for this activity. Students will choose important character traits that describe the main character and provide evidence from the text to support their choices.
• Overcoming Obstacles – Students will fill in the T-Chart with physical, emotional, or mental obstacles the character faced and describe their response to those challenges.
• Character Change – Students choose character traits to describe how the character changed throughout the story and support their thinking with evidence from the text.
• Character Development – Students describe how the character changed and developed throughout the story, state their opinion regarding which event impacted the character the most, and support their thinking with evidence from the text.
• Character Perspective – Students will compare Raven’s perspective to Madame’s perspective in the story by drawing a picture and adding words to the thought bubbles.
• Making Connections – Students make connections to an event from the story.
• Making Inferences – Students use clues and schema to come up with two inferences they made from the text.
• Theme #1 – Students answer the questions to determine which theme best fits the story and provide text evidence to support their choice.
• Theme #2 – Students answer the questions to determine the theme of the story and provide text evidence.
• Thematic Statements – Students choose the thematic statement that they believe best fits the story and include evidence from the text to support their choice.
• Sensory Details – Students choose an event from the story and describe it with the five senses.
• Compare & Contrast – Students compare the lives of Raven Wilkinson and Misty Copeland.
• Reader Response Questions – Students will respond to short-answer questions (ANSWER KEY included).
• Reading Text & Illustrations – Students will read the text, examine the illustrations, and answer the response questions (Color and B&W options included).
• 2 – Vocabulary Crossword Puzzle – Students will complete crossword puzzles by matching words from the story to their definitions (ANSWER KEYS included).
• Vocabulary Word Search Puzzle – Students will find the hidden words in the puzzle (ANSWER KEY included).
• 6-Writing Prompts – Students will respond to the writing prompts and provide evidence from the text to support their thinking when needed.
• Biography – Students will research further into the life of Raven Wilkinson.
• Who Was Misty Copeland? – Students will research to learn more about Misty Copeland and complete a biography one-pager.
• Book Review – Students rate how much they enjoyed the book, draw a new cover, and explain why kids should or should not read it.
• Design a Book Cover – Students design a new cover for the book.

The activities provided are designed to enable students to apply higher-level thinking skills, to encourage students to provide text evidence to support their thinking, and to challenge students to express their own thoughts and/or perspectives.

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

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