Pre-service teachers used blogs to discuss award-winning Newbery books using reading roles creativiely adapted from Harvey Daniel's 'Literature Circles: Voice and Choice in the Student-centered Classroom'. Contact Anne Davis at adavis@gsu.edu if you have questions.
These blogs were moved from Manila blogs to TypePad blogs. The author shows up on each post as Anne Davis as a result of the transfer. The original posts were made by students and the instructors Lynne Jordan & Anne Davis. The initials on the post title signify who did the actual blogging of the post.
I found a webquest designed for fourth and fifth grade students at www.teachertools.net/New_Folder/holes/. This webquest was designed by Douglas Price. On this site he includes activities for students to complete, such as a family tree and character research. I think this site will be very helpful to gain insight on how much students understood the book.
I found this really good WebQuest at: www.plainfield.k12.in.us/hschool/webq/webq91. This site would be a wonderful place to have students explore themes such as friendship, family relationships, nature, prejudice/racism, and reptiles as they relate to Holes. The teacher that designed it already has tasks and resources set up!
http://www.kidsreads.com/funstuff/trivia/holes-triv1.asp
This is a really good Holes trivia game that has a lot of good questions. The questions are multiple choice, but focus a lot of specific details of the book.
Students can use this website http://www.kidsreads.com/features/010314-holes.asp to create a trivia study game. If students are going to be tested on the material they read, they they can come up with questions that could be used in a practice Jeopardy game. Students may get sample questions from this website but can then come up with their own. This is a fun way to get kids excited about reading Holes. Students will want to read and reread to find out the answers for his/her team.
Jessica brought up an interesting point when commenting about one of my postings. There are so many characters in this book and I often have a hard time remembering who's who! There's Mr. Sir, the Warden, "Mom", and all the boys. I have spent some time looking back to try to clarify who does what, etc. When I use this book in my classroom, I think you could incorporate a lesson about Character Webs and using Inspiration to do so. This would benefit their technological knowledge, and also help with their reading comprehension. It could fit in with the "making connections" strategies as the children are organizing data that is relevant to the characters in the story.
