Outside My Window

The book, Outside My Window by Linda Ashman, is a perfect book to pair with the Crack the Code activity. The beautiful illustrations take your students on a trip around the world, exploring what other places look like when viewed through a local window.

Read the book or use a video read aloud from YouTube. Then ask your students to think about what they see from their windows. Re-read the book and ask that they pay special attention to the different landscapes.

Discuss what they noticed about the places in the book. How do the places compare to their neighborhood? How might the places in the book compare to the places they discovered during their Code Cracking activity?

Encourage students to create a Venn diagram to compare and contrast their favorite scene from the book with their neighborhood (or a view from their school.)

(There is also a very cool Facebook group titled "View From My Window" that was started in March 2020 as the Covid pandemic was closing schools. It currently has over 2,000,000 members and could act as another resource for the sort of activity.)

Complete and Continue