Published in 1989, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry is a Newbery-award winning historical fiction middle-grade novel. While you may remember it as a favorite from your own childhood, if you’ve never read it before, it’s a story you’ll enjoy hearing for the first time as you read it with your family.

Our Read-Aloud Poster for this book includes activities that will help your family understand the story itself as well as appreciate the historical and geographical context of the book. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the poster activities.

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Like all our Read-Aloud Posters, our poster for The Secret Garden balances novel and familiar activities within the unique context of this particular book. Our Poster Spotlight looks at the novel activities first (those that will likely be new to even seasoned Read-Aloud Poster users) and then look at the familiar activities (we’ve used some variation of the activity of previous posters). After all - if this is your very first poster, it’s all new to you!

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We’ve assembled some resources that may be helpful to you as you read A Place to Hang the Moon and complete your Read-Aloud Poster. You’ll find information on retelling and character markers as well as external links to historical archives that will deepen your appreciation of this historical facts woven into this story.

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We’re so pleased to introduce our newest Read-Aloud Poster for The Wild Robot, written by Peter Brown, available August 9. Published in 2016, this middle-grade favorite has broad appeal and is our vote for “most likely to draw in reluctant readers.” This is the story of how Roz, a robot stranded on an island, learns how to survive and make friends. We think it’s perfect for ages 5 and up.

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Although one can certainly read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe without delving into the large body of scholarly biographical and analytical works surrounding it, I thought you might be interested in hearing about some of the books I read while preparing our Read-Aloud Poster.

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