My Brother's Band 6-pack Author: Dot Meharry ISBN: 9780790321011 Lesson Plan Blackline Master Grade Level: 1 Reading Level: F Strategy/Skill: Author's purpose, Making inferences Genre: Realistic Fiction Theme/Topic: Family, School and Community Classification: Fiction Fluency: Early

Overview

This text is about a boy’s admiration for his older brother, who plays the drums.  Conveyed through the illustrations, but not mentioned in the text, is the added dimension of the older brother having Down syndrome.

Suggested Purposes

This book supports the comprehension strategies of:

• making inferences
• understanding the author’s purpose.

This is a rich text with layers of meaning and is a good model of reflective personal experience writing.

Text Features (Focus on only one or two per session.)

• the theme of inclusiveness
• the little brother’s feelings of admiration and pride
• the unnamed first-person narrator
• the changes of tense, moving from the present to the past and then to the future
• the way the author creates impact through the use of short sentences, repetition (of words and phrases), the use of the adverb “too,” and exclamation marks
• the variety of verbs and verb endings
• the “flying” drumsticks in the illustrations
• the initial consonant blends – br, cl, dr, fr, pl, pr
• the digraphs -ch – cheered, teach, teacher; -sh – showed; -th – brother, the, they, together, there, then

For more information please see our Lesson Plan