North Country Night

If you are looking for a book that talks about winter without all the snowmen, you might want to try finding a copy of North Country Night. My favorite part of this book are the beautiful illustrations. 

North Country Night opens the door to talking about nocturnal animals, animal habitats, and locations. I introduced the book with an inferencing activity using the illustration on the cover. 

My students had to look at the cover as well as my map to suggest a possible location for the setting. We talked about where it couldn't be first and moved up to where it could be. As we went through the book, I had my groups tell me about words that we ran across. They wrote down the meaning of these new words with expo markers. The next session started with a review of these words with the possibility to earn points. The "winner" got to pick our game for the day. 

Here is a copy of the book activity I made. It includes a vocabulary list, wh- questions, sequencing page for the story, and simple categorization activity.