Middle Grade Teacher's Book: Born to Play

Everything you need to teach the Born to Play novel: 16 classroom-ready lessons, answer keys and assessments, with minimal prep.

This Teacher's Book is the complete guide to using HATRIQA's Soccer Reader Method™ with Born to Play, the first Jamie Johnson novel by Dan Freedman. Jamie is a soccer-obsessed 10-year-old American who moves to England against his wishes, with no friends and no money, but he never lets go of his dream of becoming a great player. This guide turns all 24 chapters of the novel into 16 complete lessons.

What's inside

• Lessons covering all 24 chapters, grouped into 16 classes of 60 to 90 minutes, with a stage-by-stage lesson procedure and pacing guidance for faster, typical and slower classes (about 12 to 32 classroom hours)
• Full answer keys for the Middle Grade Student Workbook
• A 25-mark Vocabulary Assessment and an Individual Reading Survey, to give before and after the course and show your students' progress with real data
• Suggested extension activities for every lesson
• Character and plot summaries, learning objectives, and the Common Core College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards covered in each lesson
• A Language Work Reference for the 16 writer's craft points taught in the workbook, from metaphors and similes and punctuating speech to relative clauses and the past continuous
• Photocopiable extras: an English Spelling and Pronunciation guide to the 44 sounds of English, and a How to Learn Vocabulary worksheet

Built for real classrooms
Designed so that teachers, volunteers and parents, even those with no teaching experience, can deliver effective lessons. Activities build reading, listening, speaking and writing, with vocabulary, fluency and a focus on the writer's craft: how Dan Freedman uses language to bring the story to life. If some of your students need an easier read, an optional alignment map shows how the Jamie Johnson graded readers follow the same storyline, so a mixed-ability class can share one story.

Level: The original novel is written at native-speaker level (middle-grade fiction), with a Lexile® measure of 760L, and suits fluent and confident readers, typically ages 9 to 12, including higher-level English language learners.

Please note: this Teacher's Book is a companion to the novel Born to Play: The start of a soccer legend (The Jamie Johnson Series USA) by Dan Freedman, published by Nimble Feet (ISBN 978-1738452408), and it does not contain the story. You will need copies of the novel and the Middle Grade Student Workbook for your students. The Jamie Johnson graded readers are an optional companion for mixed-ability classes; you do not need them to teach this course.