Bubbling over books!

I love bubble map books!  They are officially my new favorite activity.  This is our second success, and definitely not the last!  It's a week long process: we start by talking about the topic (in this case, Abe), pair/share the next day to create a bubble map together, review the bubble map again the third day, and day four and five are spent illustrating and reading the book.  This activity is like magic for their reading skills.  Because they compose the text, it's so much more meaningful and they soak up the vocabulary like crazy!  These little miracle books have my kids reading sentences about Lincoln with fluency and confidence.  Not only can they read big words like important, Lincoln Memorial, and president, they are using their high-frequency words in a meaningful way to show how much they know about our 16th president!  Our last bubble map book was student-illustrated, but I used pictures I found online for this one.  We actually looked for pictures together, using the SMARTboard and Google, then matched them to the text on our map.  By the time they got the book, matching the words to the pictures was a snap.  I am so proud of my reading historians, and can't wait to see what we write next!