2010 Nominee: Max's Words

Benjamin collects stamps. Karl collects coins. When his younger brother Max decides to collect words, one word leads to another until Max has a story worth telling. Now all he needs is pictures.

Author: Kate Banks

• biography link
• photo link

Illustrator: Boris Kulikov

• biography link
• photo link

Book Activities

• Discussion questions:  What do you think this book will be about? If you were Max, what would you do if your brothers wouldn't allow you to play with their collections? What would you collect if you were going to collect something? Do you think Max's idea of collecting words was creative? How so?
  
• Reading/oral language: Read another story about words and compare and contrast the two. Use word cards or sentence strips to rearrange words into new sentences. Try reading the same sentence but changing inflectin to see if the kids can notice the different meaning. Use a thesaurus to find alternate words that mean the same thing.
  
• Writing: Use old magazines to find words and create your own short story. Use the story starter from the book...once there was a big brown dog...or other story starters.
  
• Math: Sort words by then number of letters they have. Have a contest to find the longest word. How many letters does it have?
• Science: Look up and do scientific research on one of the animals that appear in Max's story. Identify museums in your area where students could view "collections."
  
• Social Studies: Find examples of the same word in different languages. Put the words on a map of where it is uses.
  
• Cooking/Snack: Use Alpha-Bits or ABC noodles to write words.
  
• Art/Drama: Make words look like their meanings, such as hissed where the s is a snake or the word iguana with legs.
  
• Music/Movement: Play Simon Says to show the "power" of words.
  
• Technology integration: Make an ABC book of words. Assign each child a letter and they think of as many words as they can that start with that letter. Use Word, Kidspiration or Kid Pix to type up the pages. Put the finished pages together to make a class ABC book.
  

Related Books

• By Kate Banks:
• Max's Dragon (sequel)
• And if a Moon Could Talk
• The Night Walker
• Close Your Eyes
• Fox
• The Cat Who Walked Across France
• Related books:
• The Boy Who Loved Words by Roni Schottner
• Hannah's collections by Marthe Jocelyn
• Hetty's100 hats by Janet Slingsby
• Fancy Nancy series by Jane O'Connor
• Martha the dog series by Susan Meddaugh

Websites

Monarch Home

2010 Nominee Resources