This is a guest post by Lesley Boatright that originally ran in June 2014. If you like what you see here,   click here to read her blog, Practice Makes Perfect .

Recently I've started planning some social studies units, and one that I want to focus on is homes. What better way to introduce the concept of houses and homes than to read   Three Little Pigs ?

I found a great   pairing of fiction and nonfiction text in the Story World Real World series . It pairs   Three Little Pigs   and   Where Would You Like to Live?

I plan on reading   Three Little Pigs   first. After reading the story, we will take a minute to discuss the structure of a fiction text, identifying the characters, the setting, the problem, and the solution using first, middle, last. Since this will be close to the beginning of the year, I will not have the children write this out. Instead I will use my story stepping stones to have the children practice summarizing the story.

After we finish this, I will have the children use flashcards to order the houses from weakest to strongest.

We will analyze and compare the three types of houses, filling out a three-part chart as a group that tells the good and the bad about each house.

At the end of the lesson, the children will write about which house they would like to live in and tell why.

This is the first part of the lesson I have developed to go along with the fiction story,   Three Little Pigs . Look for my post in a few weeks that outlines how I will work in the nonfiction story   Where Would You Like to Live?

You can download the lesson packet at the bottom of this page.

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Lesley Boatright is an Early Childhood/Elementary Education teacher from Southwestern Pennsylvania. After graduating college, she moved to South Florida, where she taught kindergarten in the Palm Beach County School District for 8 years. After having children, she decided (with her husband) that Florida was too far away from the rest of the family, and she moved back to her hometown, where she took a few years off to spend time with her son. She has been teaching in the parochial school system for 18 years now, first at kindergarten, and currently in a first grade classroom. Lesley has also taught 2nd and 3rd grade Spanish and 4th grade social studies. Visit Lesley   at her Facebook page ,   blog ,   Pinterest , and on Teachers Pay Teachers   to get great teaching ideas .

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For more information about the   Story World Real World series shown in this post, click here to visit our website , or click the image on the left below to download a series information sheet with key features. To download the lesson packet, click the image to the right.