Use Not Norman: A Goldfish Story by Kelly Bennett to strengthen your students' comprehension skills, build their vocabulary, and help them understand how words work.
Dive into Not Norman: A Goldfish Story by Kelly Bennett, a delightful tale about a boy who learns to appreciate his pet goldfish, Norman. This engaging resource packet includes comprehension activities focusing on Identifying Author's Purpose, Making Inferences, and Synthesizing. Students will also enjoy a word work activity centered on adjectives, and extension activities that invite students to reflect on the story's themes. This resource fosters critical thinking, thoughtful reading, and meaningful connections to the story's message.
In Not Norman: A Goldfish Story, Kelly Bennett's playful yet thoughtful writing offers students an opportunity to explore the author's purpose in crafting the story. Through guided questions and analyzing key moments, such as the boy's changing attitude toward Norman, students will uncover how the author communicates an important message about friendship and appreciating what you have.
Not Norman: A Goldfish Story provides numerous opportunities for students to practice making inferences about the boy's feelings and actions. Through detailed illustrations and textual clues, students will infer how the boy's attitude toward Norman evolves from disappointment to affection. This strategy helps students strengthen their comprehension by encouraging them to think beyond the text and draw conclusions based on evidence.
As the boy's relationship with Norman deepens, students will practice synthesizing by combining information from different parts of the story to understand how the boy's feelings change over time. This activity helps students see the big picture—how initial frustration turns into appreciation—and allows them to connect the story's events to the central theme of finding joy in unexpected friendships.
This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Not Norman: A Goldfish Story by Kelly Bennett as a springboard for instruction focused on adjectives.
By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how adjectives are used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with parts of speech.
This set of vocabulary development resources for Not Norman: A Goldfish Story 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.
Understanding cause and effect is a key comprehension and language skill. The text structure of Not Norman: A Goldfish Story 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.
Read Not Norman: A Goldfish Story 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 Not Norman: A Goldfish Story. 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.
In Not Norman, we discover that even unexpected pets can become the perfect companions. This creative writing activity invites students to imagine their ideal pet—real or imaginary—and describe what makes it special. They will write about its appearance, favorite activities, and why it's the perfect pet for them. This activity encourages creativity, responsibility, and personal expression, making it a fun and meaningful extension to the story.
