Every year I have a few students who don’t want to try something new because of the fear of failure. It is so hard to teach students to step outside their comfort zone and take risks. Today we are spotlighting the book The Thing Lou Couldn’t Do which tells the story of a little girl who has that same problem. Students will watch as Lou learns that her fear of trying keeps her from having fun. I love using this book to teach my students that learning something new takes time, it doesn’t always happen on the first try. - Jodi and the Starts With a Story Team
SUMMARY
Lou and her friends love playing together: they run fast, build forts, and go on adventures. Lou believes in herself and wants to do exciting things when she grows up like drive cars or dive in the sea. One day, Lou’s friends decide they want to play pirates and a tree can be their pirate ship. Lou has never climbed a tree before, and is nervous about being up high. While her friends start to climb the tree, Lou starts to make all kinds of excuses as to why she can’t climb: she needs to walk the cat, she just ate, an asteroid was coming, and that she didn’t feel well. She doesn’t understand what is so great about climbing trees anyway. However, after watching and listening to her friends play, she starts to feel left out. Lou tries to think of other ways to get into the tree, but eventually tries to climb. She gives climbing her best try, but is not able to get up the tree. Lou realizes that she can’t climb yet, but will try again soon.
USE THIS BOOK TO TEACH:
The Thing Lou Couldn’t Do is a must have book for social emotional learning. While the main focus is teaching growth mindset and perseverance, you’ll find that it is a great mentor text for many academic skills as well.
- Help students to identify the main idea of the book. This is an important skill for students to master, especially as they get older.
- Spend time analyzing the character Lou. What thoughts does she have about herself and what does she learn?
- Encourage students to make connections to the story. This will increase their engagement and understanding of the book.
- Write alternate endings to the book or have students continue the story. Creative writing is always fun for students.
- Ask students to write book reviews for the story.
- Use examples from the book to teach a lesson on onomatopoeia.
- Introduce new prefixes and suffixes.
- Teach students how to use positive self-talk and have a growth mindset.
NO-PREP PRINTABLE ACTIVITIES:
If you are looking for “ready to go” activities for the first day of school, be sure to check out the book companion. With it you’ll receive all of the following resources to align with this specific book:
- comprehension questions
- 30 writing prompts with themed paper
- vocabulary activities
- word study print & go activities
- ideas for grammar lessons with focus sentence printables
- social emotional learning discussion topics
- graphic organizers to target specific comprehension skills and strategies
You might be thinking, “how would I ever have time to plan lessons for all those skills?” Well the good news is, you don’t have to! Thanks to our Starts With a Book Companion we’ve done the planning for you. You can pick and choose which student activity pages you want to use because there is such a big variety. Enjoy!
GET THE PRINTABLE ACTIVITIES
ADDITIONAL BOOK SUGGESTIONS
You and your students will also love these similar books:
- The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashely Spires
- The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes by Mark Pett
- After the Fall by Dan Santat
- Ada Twist, Scientist by Andrea Beaty
TRY OUT A SAMPLE COMPANION
It's hard to explain how amazing the Starts with a Story book companions are because there is just so much goodness included in each one. It's best if you experience using one for yourself. Sign up below & we'll send you an entire book companion to try out for FREE!
