“School Sleepover” Week 8 Fourth Grade

The Spencer School Sleepover (Fiction, Level 12, Stage 3) by Lucy Floyd

This week we learned about sleepovers thanks to our AlphaSkills book The Spencer School Sleepover. Our family travels and moves a lot, so we’ve only ever had sleepovers with grandparents. This book was a wonderful way for us to talk about sleepovers with friends or special events at school, and it was also a really fun book about some pretty neat characters that opened up a discussion about bullies, safety rules, and showing compassion to others.

The activities I want to highlight from this week are the discussion and writing activities provided in the Guided Lesson. Some of the prompts from this week include the following: develop background about sleepovers; talk about being the smallest in a group; review the elements of the mystery genre; find out more about the characters Conrad, Leapfrog, Lilith, Halima, etc.; predict what will happen next for the characters; write how you think Conrad felt after the sleepover; identify the problem in the story; write about Conrad’s award. What I love most about using these discussion and writing prompts is the amount of time and energy it saves me as a homeschooling mom who also has loads of other responsibilities. By using these guided lessons we are able to get the most out of our AlphaSkills resources without having to come up with everything on our own. (But also, the program allows for a lot of creativity when you do want to add on!)

For more information about the AlphaSkills Read with Sarah curriculum and our family, see the AlphaSkills Blog Introduction.