The Fabled Fourth Graders of Aesop Elementary School

Title: The Fabled Fourth Graders of Aesop Elementary School     
Author: Candace Fleming
Publisher: Schwartz and Wade   
Publication Date: 2007
Genre/Format: Realistic Fiction/Novel   
Summary: Funny stories about a class of fourth graders and their teacher at Aesop Elementary school.   
What I Think: I wasn't sure what I thought when I started reading about this naughty class of 4th graders...but as I continued reading they grew on me.  In a way this book reminded me of Sideways Stories from Wayside School by Louis Sachar, but definitely for an older student and a little more serious.  What I enjoyed about this book was that each chapter ended with a moral which outlined what a character learned in the chapter.  My favorite chapter was "The Spelling Goddess" and I definitely think that chapter and others could even be read as short stories apart from the rest of the book if you wanted to.  As a teacher, I enjoyed the character Mr. Jupiter, who is the teacher for the fourth grade class.  He has a funky sense of humor that was a fun element of the book. 
Read Together: 4 - 6 
Read Alone: 4 - 7 
Read With: Sideways Stories from Wayside School and others in the series by Louis Sachar; No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman; The Strange Case of Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger; Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen; The Lemonade War by Jacqueline Davies; fables - by Aesop or others
Snatch of Text: "She felt like a scoop of vanilla ice cream on a hot summer's day-all sweet and drippy." p. 15   
Reading Strategies to Practice: Author's Purpose, Visualizing, Activating Background Knowledge, Making Connections, Characteristics of Folk Literature - Fables   
Writing Strategies to Practice: Personal Narrative, Simile   
Writing Prompts: Think about a time in your life when you learned a lesson - write about that time and state the moral of the story at the end.    
Topics Covered: Friends, School, Honesty, Bullying, Being Yourself, Library - Dewey Decimal, Folk Literature - Fables, Morals, Truth   
Translated to Spanish: No