Fancy Nancy as a Mentor Text for Academic Vocabulary

It's that time of year for so many of us right now. Our spring break ended on Friday, and the testing has begun. With many of my groups. I have been working on academic vocabulary. I wanted to share some of the activities we did with you in The Reading Crew's spring link up! {Affiliate links provided in this post to fund future book purchases.}

I always like to start off my lessons with a mentor text to get us up and running. This usually works as the hook to get my students interested in the lessons that come after. I love Fancy Nancy books, and I found the perfect book for springtime:  Fancy Nancy: Bonjour Butterfly. In the book, she is down because she can't go to her friend's birthday but has to go to her grandparents' anniversary party.

If you haven't read a Fancy Nancy book, you are missing out! These books are chock full of higher level words that really make kids think. She constantly uses big words and tells the reader what they mean. For example, Nancy scowls, sulks, and storms around the house when she is mad.

Though this isn't really academic vocabulary, we talked about how those big words help us know and understand what we are reading. I then showed the students some words they may see in test questions and daily school life. We talked about how to read them and what they all mean. Here is the anchor chart we have started. We will continue to add words as we discuss them.

After discussing the meanings, I put students into groups and gave them some questions to read. While reading the questions and answers, their goal was to find the words and highlight them. (Yes, I checked to make sure the words were there!) They shared their findings and told what the words mean and how to answer the questions.

Finally, we played the FUN game! Using the cards in my Growing Academic Vocabulary Game, we played the board game. They had a blast!

And you can grab a copy of it by clicking {here} or on the picture below.

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