Smurfs: The Lost Village In Theaters April 2017

ACTIVITY 1: What BIG Job Should You Reach For?

Inspire your students to think about what adventures their futures can hold. Just as Smurfette searches for her purpose in the upcoming film Smurfs: The Lost Village, your students can begin investigating how interests and skills connect to types of jobs.

Objectives: Students will:
• Identify and use the conventions of quotation marks • Become familiar with a variety of jobs and be able to explain why they would or wouldn’t like them • Practice conducting a short interview

Materials:
• Classroom Poster

1. Activate Prior Knowledge:

• Tap into what students already know about jobs in their community by brainstorming a list of careers. Ask students to identify the jobs people do at their school, then neighborhood, city, and state, and finally jobs that have a national scope, such as working in the federal government. Begin filling out the poster chart.

2. Quotation Scavenger Hunt:

• Review with students that quotation marks let us know when we are reading someone’s exact words. Often, a quotation is introduced or followed by a verb connected to who is speaking.

• Distribute a novel to each student. Direct students to find examples of sentences with quotation marks. Instruct students to try to determine the rules for using commas and quotation marks. Do the speaker’s name and the attached verb go inside the quotation marks? Does the comma? When?

• Discuss students’ findings and guide the class, as necessary, in identifying the standard conventions.

3. Anchor Sentences:

• Write an example sentence on the board, such as: Papa Smurf said, “Baseball players have to travel a lot. I like being at home, so I wouldn’t like that job.” Call students’ attention to the placement of the comma after the word said and to how a quotation begins with a capital letter.

• Rewrite the sentence so the speaker is given at the end. Point out to students how the comma is inside the quotation in this case: “I wouldn’t like that job,” Papa Smurf said. Encourage students to share ideas for how to remember that the comma goes inside the quotation marks only when it’s at the end.

• Level up for grade 4 by connecting the conventions of quotation marks and commas to direct quotes from a text when conducting research.

4. Interview Activity:

• Pair students to conduct a short interview of their partner. Have students choose a career from the list on the board and ask their partner if he or she would like that job and why.

• Have students write down four quotations their partner said and then include them in two sentences that start with their partner’s name and two that end with it, punctuated appropriately. For example: Clumsy Smurf said, “Being a chef sounds fun because you could bake cookies at your job.”

• Invite students to swap sentences and proofread each other’s work.