Use Amos and Boris by William Steig to strengthen your students' comprehension skills, build their vocabulary, and help them understand how words work.
Explore the heartwarming tale of Amos & Boris by William Steig, a story about the unlikely friendship between a mouse and a whale. This engaging resource package offers activities that help students strengthen their comprehension skills through Understanding Text Structure, Synthesizing, and Visualizing.
Alongside these comprehension strategies, students will explore adjectives in a fun word work activity and expand their vocabulary with a challenging word list.
For an exciting extension, students can express their opinions in a writing piece that asks, "Who is the bigger hero: Amos or Boris?" This resource encourages critical thinking, creativity, and meaningful connections to the story.
The emotional journey in Amos & Boris encourages students to practice synthesizing by piecing together the characters' actions and personal growth. From Amos's adventurous spirit to Boris's selfless kindness, students will connect these details to understand how the characters' relationship evolves. Steig's writing will encourage readers to uncover the deeper message about friendship.
Amos & Boris offers a clear structure, making it ideal for exploring problem and solution, cause and effect, and compare and contrast. Students will examine how the events unfold, such as Boris saving Amos and Amos later helping Boris. By analyzing the structure, students will understand how the story's organization supports its themes of friendship, loyalty, and heroism.
William Steig's rich descriptions and limited illustrations in Amos & Boris invite readers to visualize scenes such as Amos sailing on the ocean or Boris stranded on the shore. Students will use clues from the text to create mental images that deepen their understanding of the story's setting, characters, and key events. This strategy allows students to engage their imaginations and make the story come alive.
This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Amos & Boris by William Steig as a springboard for instruction focused adjectives.
By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing adjectives used inside the text before engaging in guided and independent practice with adjectives.
This set of vocabulary development resources for Amos & Boris highlights the words that are most important for students to know and understand while reading the book. Through engaging in fun word games, matching words to definitions and pictures, and practicing how to categorize words, students will develop the vocabulary necessary to comprehend this story and many others.
Read Amos & Boris then have some fun matching cause and effect sentences from the book. By using these cause and effect cards, students will demonstrate both their comprehension of the text and their understanding of cause and effect relationships in a hands-on and interactive way.
This resource includes matching/sorting cards and a sorting mat for four cause and effect sentences in Amos & Boris. Each cause card is marked with a square and each effect card is marked with a circle, making it easy to support students who struggle with matching cause and effect relationships.
Understanding cause and effect is a key comprehension and language skill. The text structure of Amos & Boris includes several examples of cause and effect relationships, making it easy to use as a springboard for modeling or independent practice.
This simple resource includes four sentence stems. Each sentence stem presents an effect. Students will use what they know about the book to fill in the cause of the effect.
In Amos & Boris, both characters display bravery and kindness, but who deserves the title of the bigger hero? This engaging activity encourages students to analyze the story and form their own opinions. Using critical thinking and persuasive writing, they will follow guided prompts to support their argument with evidence from the book. Perfect for developing reasoning skills and strengthening comprehension, this activity fosters thoughtful discussion and a deeper appreciation of character traits.
Amos the mouse and Boris the whale: a devoted pair of friends with nothing at all in common, except good hearts and a willingness to help their fellow mammal. They meet after Amos sets out to sail the sea and finds himself in extreme need of rescue. And there will come a day, long after Boris has gone back to a life at sea and Amos has gone back to life on dry land, when the tiny mouse must find a way to rescue the great whale.
Amos & Boris is a 1971 New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year, Notable Children's Book of the Year, and Outstanding Book of the Year.
