Not Your Typical Friendship Fruit Salad

As a former Kindergarten teacher I have always enjoyed doing the Friendship Fruit Salad activity- you know the one where your students bring in different kinds of fruit and you talk about how the different fruits represent the different children in the classroom.  It's a great community building activity that shows that everyone is special and different but we can all make something amazing when you put us together.  Then, you bring in a very old, mushy banana.  You start to put it in the fruit salad and hopefully someone tells you not to because it's old, disgusting and will make it all taste really bad.  That's when you tell them that the rotten banana represents the times when students misbehave or are mean to each other.  You tell them that you don't want the rotten banana in the fruit salad, just like the students in the classroom don't want someone in the classroom who is always mean or misbehaving.  You decide as the teacher not to put the rotten banana in the fruit salad and you ask students to promise to try not to be rotten bananas in the classroom.

Well, as a 3rd grade teacher this activity is do-able, but kind of babyish.  BUT, I decided to put a 3rd grade spin on it.  I decided to make it into a close reading activity.  One of the first standards we focus on is RL3.1- the one about asking and answering questions and referring explicitly to the text for the answer.  I wrote a close reading story and some 5W questions.  I am going to teach my students a color-coding system at the beginning of the year when they are just beginning to refer explicitly to the text for their answers. They will highlight the answer to each of the 5W questions with a different color of crayon/colored pencil.  This gets them used to highlighting the text, and it provides them with practice finding the answers in the text.

I am also including a proficiency scale I made for RL3.1 skills for first quarter- we will add more rigor to the scale as we go throughout the school year- this is just the beginning skills for this standard.  Here are some pictures of the activity and grab the freebie at my TpT store Friendship Fruit Salad: A Close Reading Activity