Use Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts to strengthen your students' comprehension skills, build their vocabulary, and help them understand how words work.
Those Shoes tells the heartfelt story of Jeremy, a boy who dreams of having the popular sneakers everyone else at school is wearing. When Jeremy's family cannot afford the shoes, he learns valuable lessons about wants versus needs, generosity, and what it means to help others.
This resource package focuses on three key comprehension strategies—Making Inferences, Identifying Author's Purpose, and Synthesizing—helping students dive deeper into the story while strengthening their critical thinking skills. After reading the book, you can extend your instruction to focus on blends and digraphs, and key vocabulary.
Those Shoes offers a rich opportunity for students to determine Maribeth Boelts' purpose in writing the story. By exploring themes of generosity, empathy, and the difference between wants and needs, students will uncover how the author conveys her message and why these ideas are important. Furthermore, students can dive deep to understand Boelts' purpose for specific characters, interactions, and events throughout the story.
In Those Shoes, Maribeth Boelts uses dialogue, illustrations, and character actions to encourage readers to infer Jeremy's feelings and motivations. Students will practice understanding why Jeremy makes certain choices, like giving the shoes to Antonio, and how these decisions reveal his character. This activity builds critical thinking as students read between the lines and explore the deeper meaning behind his actions.
Jeremy's journey in Those Shoes helps students practice synthesizing as they follow his changing thoughts and feelings. By connecting new ideas from the text with their own understanding, students will grasp the deeper message of the story. This activity emphasizes how Jeremy's growth and final decision highlight themes of kindness and selflessness.
This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts as a springboard for instruction focused on blends and digraphs.
By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how s-blends vs. digraph "sh" are used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with blends and digraphs.
This set of vocabulary development resources for Those Shoes 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 Those Shoes 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 Those Shoes 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 Those Shoes. 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 Those Shoes, Jeremy learns to appreciate the difference between wants and needs. With this activity, students will create their own lists of wants and needs, then choose the most important item from each. This helps them reflect on what truly matters and practice making thoughtful choices.
