In today’s Book Talk session, we explored the front cover of our new text to allow us to fully immerse into the text and understand right from the front cover what we might expect from the book. We then read the synopsis that had been written which gave us a little more information and got us really questioning what the text might be about. We also explored some of the pictures from the text as an extra stimulus. We then tried to answer the following questions: What does it remind us of? What do we think it will be about or is going to happen? What do we wonder? And what do we notice? We recorded our responses during a ‘Silent Conversation’ and then shared our comments as a crew.
We ended the session by discussing how important it is to really look at the front cover, picture clues and read the synopsis before selecting a book. This was especially important for this text because lots of our initial responses were that the front cover looked ‘old’, ‘boring’, ‘old fashioned’ and ‘plain’. However, after reading the synopsis and seeing some images from the text lots of us changed our opinion of the text and are now excited to look at it more next lesson!