This Interactive Read Aloud of Faithful Elephants by Yukio Tsuchiya provides the thought-provoking questions, essential to every interactive read aloud, and uses the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy Cognitive Dimensions. Your students will soon be in deep discussions, ranging from plot analysis to author’s message exploration.
Each month I spotlight a Book of the Month and use it as an interactive read aloud to help promote class discussion at a high level, and to cultivate a community of readers that love discussing books. Along with the book, and based off of the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy Cognitive Dimensions, I give teachers examples of text-specific questions to ask during the read aloud. I'm amazed at the increased engagement and level of discussion amongst my students around the chosen text.
Today I've decided to share my read aloud of Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People & War by Yukio Tsuchiya. This story has a powerful message that is great to use with students of upper elementary school grade levels. The topic is difficult to process, so this book should be read with students mature enough to handle war and death.
This book is a powerful and tragic story of three elephants’ struggle to survive after they were sentenced to death during WWII. A zookeeper at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo tells the story of John, Tonky and Wanly three elephants killed (along with all the other animals in the zoo) by command of the Japanese army. Yukio Tsuchiya wrote Faithful Elephants, “to let children know about the grief, fear, and sadness war produces. And that war affects not only human beings, but also innocent and lovely animals that don’t know, understand, or even care about war.”
Download my Critical Thinking Interactive Read Aloud of Faithful Elephants now!