Use The Widow’s Broom by Chris Van Allsburg to strengthen your students' comprehension skills, build their vocabulary, and help them understand how words work.
Elevate comprehension by showing students how to ask questions and unlock the deeper meaning in The Widow's Broom. This lesson plan and resource set help readers ask meaningful questions and support their thinking with text evidence.
This ready-to-use minilesson provides students with the opportunity to practice determining importance within The Widow's Broom . Readers will navigate events and conflicts in the text to recognize the details most important to the storyline and the author's message.
Messages of encouraging compassion and acceptance are intertwined with engaging illustrations that keep readers thinking in this tale of the widow and her broom. Readers will be inspired to consider the true motivation of author Chris Van Allsburg as they uncover the messages within The Widow's Broom.
Readers will make connections to bring about a more in-depth and meaningful understanding of this story of the widow and her companion. This lesson plan and set of resources offer students powerful ways to think and connect as they read to increase overall comprehension.
This book is rich in opportunities to practice making inferences. Students will activate prior knowledge and use clues from the text to draw conclusions about the characters and their motivations. Deeper understanding is unlocked as readers recognize the messages embedded in the text.
This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use The Widow's Broom by Chris Van Allsburg as a springboard for instruction focused on parts of speech.
By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how prepositional phrases 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 The Widow's Broom 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 The Widow's Broom 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 The Widow's Broom 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 The Widow's Broom. 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.
The BookPagez extension activities are a great way to push student engagement beyond the pages of the text. Try using this activity with early finishers, with students who show a deeper connection with the text, or as a center activity.
