Are you looking for an engaging story to read aloud with your early elementary students this holiday season? The Relatives Came is always a great choice! In this post, I’m going to share some of my favorite The Relatives Came activities and lessons to help you plan an engaging read aloud for your class.
Reading Comprehension Practice with Read Alouds
Read alouds play an important role in early elementary literacy instruction. As teachers read a story out loud to their students, they are doing all of the decoding work so that students can do all of the thinking work. This is so helpful for students to be able to strengthen their comprehension skills!
Even though much of early literacy is focused on phonological awareness and decoding, comprehension is vital for young learners! As we can see from Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope infographic, language comprehension is one of the essential strands in the rope. It intertwines with the other reading sub-skills to develop skilled reading.
The Relatives Came Activities
The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant is a beautifully illustrated book to read to your class as the holiday season approaches. Since many students will be visiting with relatives over the coming weeks, this book is a great option for a read aloud!
In this story, a carload of relatives from Virginia makes a long trip to visit their family. The book shares the details of this visit from the early morning start of the road trip to the fun activities they share together during their visit before ending with their final goodbyes.
There are many ways to incorporate reading comprehension strategies as you share this story with your class.
1. Making Connections
Making text connections is an important comprehension strategy for young students to practice. Both text-to-text and tex-to-self connections can encourage students to draw on their prior knowledge, improving comprehension.
A connections anchor chart can be helpful as you read The Relatives Came with your class. Students can share their connections with the text as you read. From long car trips to large family dinners, your students will find many ways to connect with this story.
2. Story Retelling
After reading the story to your class, you can have them practice retelling the story. First, you can put the story events in order, which is great sequencing practice! Then students can practice retelling the story using the visual to help them remember the different parts of the story.
Students can also cut and paste their own pictures into a journal or onto paper to create their own story retelling visual.
3. Vocabulary
When students hear the title of the story, they might now even know what relatives are! As with any read aloud, this story has a variety of different vocabulary words that you can discuss with your students.
You can talk about what the words mean as well as other words with similar meanings. Students can also practice using these new vocabulary words in a sentence,
4. Comprehension Questions
Students can then stretch their comprehension muscles by answering text-based questions. These comprehension questions come in multiple-choice and true-or-false formats, both of which are helpful for young students to practice.
As you go over the comprehension questions with your students, you can model how to go back into the text to look for the answers. This is an important skill that will serve students for years to come, so it’s important to model and practice it whenever possible.
5. Making Inferences
Looking for text evidence is also an important part of making inferences! Students need to be able to reference the clues from the story that led them to make the inference that they did.
After reading The Relatives Came with your students, you can invite students to use clues from the text to infer how the family members felt when they saw each other. They can write and illustrate a response that shares their inference along with the clues that led them to draw that conclusion.
6. Opinion Writing
Once students have had a chance to experience the story and practice a variety of comprehension skills, it’s time for them to share their opinions! They can write about their favorite part of the read aloud, referencing evidence from the story to support their opinion.
Students can also enhance their opinion writing with illustrations. These writing projects are fun to display so students can see how their classmates felt about the book! This can be a great way to build community, since students are always eager to point out to their classmates that they liked the same part of the story.
7. The Relatives Came Craft
A fun way to wrap up your lesson plans for The Relatives Came is to put together a cute craft! Students can create their own car crafts to accompany a comprehension activity from the story. In this case, students completed a connections activity that was mounted on the construction paper with their car crafts.
Students can choose the car color as well as decide who will be riding in the car. This is a fun way for them to continue to connect to the story! The completed car crafts make an adorable bulletin board display!
Printable Activities for The Relatives Came
All of the activities pictured in this post (and many more!) are included in one time-saving printable resource. This set of activities includes everything you need to bring additional comprehension practice to the read alouds in your classroom.
This resource also includes scripted, research-based lesson plans that will help you take the guesswork out of planning your interactive read alouds! Just head over to my TPT store to take a closer look at everything included in this resource.
Save These Read Aloud Activities
Be sure to save these activities for The Relatives Came so you can come back to them later! Just add the pin below to your favorite Pinterest board of read aloud activities. You’ll be able to quickly find these activity ideas when you’re putting together your lesson plans for The Relatives Came.
