Robot in Love by T.L. McBeth is the perfect book to enhance your next Valentine’s Day-inspired lesson. Its quirky humor and endearing robot main character provide a great opportunity to build reading comprehension skills.
With the help of this book’s captivating storyline, you can engage your students in Valentine’s Day reading comprehension activities for making inferences, exploring character traits, activating schema, answering questions, and connecting fiction to nonfiction.
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Set the stage. Show students the cover and have them make predictions about the story. Use questioning cards to guide your classroom book conversation.
Once you’ve read the book, bring out your focus posters to discuss the skill of making inferences. Depending on your students’ familiarity with the concept, you may need extra time to build their understanding. After discussing, guide your students through a reading response activity.
In Robot in Love, there are scenes where the robot walks through traffic, floats through the air, and lands in a puddle. Ask students to infer what’s happening in each scene using a flip-flap activity. They will apply their inference skills and deepen their comprehension of the story.
Robot in Love offers a unique opportunity to explore both human and robotic character traits. Create a class anchor chart that identifies the robot’s human qualities and his robotic qualities. Discuss how the book’s humor comes from how the robot flips between both worlds, sometimes behaving like a human and other times acting more robotic.
Explain to your students that this is why we often read books more than once—each read-through offers new layers of understanding! Encourage them to think about how different qualities can coexist in one character, making the story funnier and more relatable.
Students can make connections between their own experiences and the story. After a second read of Robot in Love, pause to discuss student observations and thoughts. Display your focus reading poster for schema and explain that everyone’s schema is shaped by their unique experiences.
For a follow-up activity, have students listen to the song “Electric Avenue”. Then, students write about how this new knowledge changes their understanding of the book. How does their schema shift after hearing the song?
Use this opportunity to show how building background knowledge can affect comprehension. The more schema we have, the more we understand the books we read!
Prompting students to make personal connections to the text can enhance comprehension. After reading Robot in Love, ask students to respond to the prompt: If you could have a robot to help you with any task, what would that task be?
Encourage them to describe their ideal robot and the task it would complete. This will spark their imagination and give them a chance to practice written expression and creativity.
Connect fiction to nonfiction by reading How It’s All Changed, an informational text about technology through the ages. Have students use a reading response sheet to compare the technology of the past to today’s technology.
Students will see how themes in Robot in Love connect to real-world advancements, enhancing their understanding of the story and deepening their comprehension of both fiction and nonfiction texts.
For a fun and useful way to expand on this lesson, check out how to create a story retell Valentine’s Day gift bag or our other Valentine’s Day activities that expand the fun into math!
Hey, y’all! My name is Amy Lemons and I am passionate about providing students with both engaging and effective standards-based Math and ELA lessons.
Sample a day of Rooted in Reading with these lesson plans and activities for Reading Comprehension, Vocabulary, and Grammar!
