Patricia Polacco
Author Study
Introduction
She also has a autobiography section on her site, which would be a great read for the class as an introduction to the author before reading any of her books.
Selection of Books by Patricia Polacco
Thank You, Mr. Falker
Pink and Say
The Junkyard Wonders
Bully
In our classrooms, we are bound to be faced with situations involving bullys and bullying. In Patricia Polacco's book, Bully, Patricia writes a story of a young girl exposed to bullying in her new school. This book paints a realistic story about what bullying can look like in a school. In this story, Lyla meets a new friend, Jamie, on the first day of her new school. But when Lyla joins the cheerleading squad and recieves recognition for her good grades, the school's most popular group of girls asks her to join them. It starts off fun and exciting for Lyla, but she begins to see how vicious they are to their classmates and decides to leave the group. This leads to a rough start for Lyla as the popular group start bringing trouble on her.
This book is a great resource to begin a lesson on anti-bullying and get students to start a discussion about bullying in school and outside of school (such as cyberbullying).
Thunder Cake
Thunder Cake tells of a sweet story between a granddaughter and her Babushka, her grandmother from Russia. The story is told in the perspective of the granddaughter in which she tells of the time she spent summer days at her grandma's farm and when her grandma helped her overcome her fear of thunderstorms. As the grandma put it, "This is thunder cake baking weather". This story shows a different perspective to thunderstorms and helps the young granddaughter replace her fear with excitement.
This book could be used to teach weather units and also a language arts lesson on onomatopoeia.
Lesson plan idea:
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/lesson-plan/thunder-cake-teaching-plan