Count down to Birthdays
In the book, Molly gets jealous of her little brother, Ben. He is planning his birthday and Molly is not enjoying all the attention being on him. She has a very negative attitude towards her brother throughout the entire book. At the end Ben gets two baseball cards, Molly's old roller skates, a gum rapper chain, and a letter. The letter is sweet from Molly and Ben feels special. In the classroom we would read this book and then talk about if my students have ever felt jealous of someone else. I would have the students talk about why they felt this way and something they could have done to change the outcome.
I would then have a birthday chart and we would fill this out together. I would write students birthdays on my chart and begin a countdown for everyone's birthday. The students would then get a sheet of paper where I could tell them how many more days until their birthday. We would start a countdown with helps students to learn to count backwards.
