Pete the Cat and the Tip-Top Tree House by James Dean: lesson plan

Climb High with Pete the Cat: Adventures in the Tip-Top Tree House! 🌳🐾

Join Pete and his pals as they build the coolest tree house ever — a fun-filled story about friendship, teamwork, and sky-high imagination!

Topic: rooms of the house / friendship / teamwork

Level: A1

Skills:

LOTS:

• remembering: recall characters and settings

• understanding: discuss why characters end up playing in the playground

HOTS

• analyzing

• organizing information

• evaluating

• critical thinking

Language focus: speaking, listening, basic writing

Pre-reading

Show students a picture of a tree house. Ask them to think about the activities they can do there, how many rooms there could be and what features would it have (e.g. a balcony).

Ask students imagine what they would do on a tree house, if they had one.

Guiding understanding

Ask students to draw a table with two columns, on one column they write YES and the other column they write NO. Ask students to decide what rooms could be built in a tree house by writing the name of the room under the correct heading. Use both conventional rooms of the house vocabulary (e.g. bedroom, bathroom, etc) and vocabulary taken from the story: tower, arcade, bowling alley, wave pool, cinema, skate park, climbing wall and ice rink. Elicit meaning of all new vocabulary.

Reading

Open the book and start telling the story. Telling is more personal than reading or watching a video but, depending on your type of students, you can choose either.

Ensure the reading of the story is as interactive as possible. Module your voice according to the situation, ask students to anticipate events or describe situations. Ask students to raise their hand every time they hear a word from the list they have previously worked on.

Alternatively, they could underline the words in the table that appear in the story.

Post-reading activities

• check that your students remember who are the characters and the settings

• check students' understanding by debating if it is possible to build all those rooms on a tree house

• collect information from the class survey: check how many students thought it was possible to build a wave pool on a tree house, how many didn't. Continue with the other rooms, write all info on the board

• organize data on a bar chart: on the vertical axe write as many numbers as students in class (e.g. 0 to 15), on the horizontal axe write the name of the rooms you wish to survey. For each room, create a YES and a No bar on the graph

• study the bar chart and comment results in class