Third Graders Jump into "The Year of the Panda" in Fiction Book Groups

    After completing an extensive research project on giant pandas, third graders delved into the fiction book The Year of the Panda in book groups.  This story, by Miriam Schlein, features a boy named Lu Yi who lives on a farm at the foot of the mountains of China.  One day, a giant panda appears in a neighbor's field, a rare occurrence, given the farm's distance from the high-mountain bamboo forests that pandas inhabit.  Soon after, Lu Yi is on a walk with his father in the woods when they come upon an orphaned baby panda.  Lu Yi nurses the helpless animal back to health and quickly develops a bond with the small panda.

        While this story is fictional, it does educate the third graders about bamboo die offs, which happen about every 60 years, as well as what the Chinese government has tried to do to protect pandas. In the story,  Lu Yi travels with the panda, Su Lin, to a panda research center, where is is able to learn first hand about panda conservation.  Through reading this story, third graders were able to use the knowledge they learned during our panda research, and they were also able to put themselves into Lu Yi's shoes as they talked and wrote about what it would be like to care for a baby panda.  The students were very enthusiastic about reading The Year of the Panda after completing panda research and they loved sharing facts that they knew about pandas.