The Salmander Room

 The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer is about a young boy named Brian who finds an orange salamander in the woods. Brian takes the salamander home. When Brian brings the salamander home his mom asks Brian many questions, like where will the salamander live, where he will sleep, what he will eat and so on.  Brian comes up with responses to all of his mother's questions. His imagination eventually turns his responses into a fantasy story. He goes on and on about all of the things that the salamander will have and about how his bedroom will turn into a big beautiful forest.





The Salamander  Room is a great book for teaching visualization because the text is very descriptive. When Brian describes the things he would do to his room to make the salamander comfortable he uses very descriptive language. For example when Brian says “I will carpet my room with shiny wet leaves and water them so he can slide around and  play.” The   reader can  picture  a  room  with  shiny  wet leaves  on   th e floor . To   teach students  how   to  use  visualizing  as  a  comprehension  strategy  you  could  read  the  story  aloud  to  the  students  and   share   the   pictures   until   you   come   to  a quote  you   have   already   picked out. Then, stop! Don't  show  the  picture....yet.  Have the students stop and think   about  what   they see  in  their minds   and   have   them   to   share  their  mental   picture   with   the   class . You   could   also  add   some   of     the   ideas  that  the   students   come up with  to  a chart  with   one   side   labeled  quote   from  text   and  our  mental  image.
We enjoyed this book. The illustrations in this book are very nice and we think students would enjoy both the book and the illustrations.

Here's a link to a read aloud of The Salamander Room:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZrtzCA9pmY
The   link  to  our   visualizing  activity : http://theteachingthief.blogspot.com/2012/07/visualizing-beyond-text-with.html

Smoky Night

Smoky Night is about a young boy named Daniel. The book Smoky Night is about this young boy's perspective of the Los Angeles street riots. He watches the riot from his window as people steal TVs, shoes, clothes, and food. Although they're neighbors, Daniel's cat and Mrs. Kim's cat don't get along. Nor do Daniel and his mother shop at Mrs. Kim's market. ``It's better if we buy from our own people,'' Daniel's mother says. But when Daniel's apartment building goes up in flames, all of the neighbors (including the cats) learn the value of bridging differences.The writer Eve Bunting doesn't explicitly connect her message about racism in the story, but it can be inferred through the text.

 The book Smoky Night is a great book to teach inferences because the author's message about racism is not explicitly connected in the story, but it can be inferred through the text. An example of an inference that can be made through the text is when Daniel says, "Ms. Kim yells at Jasmine( Daniel's cat) in words that I don't understand." The inference that can be made from this part of the story is that Ms. Kim speaks another language and that she may be a different race. To teach making inferences using Smoky Night  we would read the book aloud and while we are reading we would model inferring by doing a think aloud.While doing the read  aloud we would make sure we use phrases like, I know______ information from the book, and I know______from my brain, so_____ must be true. While reading we would have the students to raise their hands to share inferences they made about the story.

 We believe this is a great book to use in the classroom to teach inferences, because the theme of the book has to be inferred. We also think that this book would also teach students important life lessons. 


Check out this read aloud of Smoky Night https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThsWi-yHf9g
We found our activity at http://www.tips-for-teachers.com/inferencing_mini_lessons.htm
                                           http://www.ehow.com/how_8231535_teach-inference-fourth-grade.html