Digital Teaching Lessons for On the Far Side of the Mountain

These lessons are prepared to help students read and study the book On the Far Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George.

These lessons are not intended to be an elaborate array of creative lesson plans; rather, they are a series of worksheets and activities that will help with and check students’ basic understanding of the story and will provide some written and other exercises to help improve students’ critical thinking and writing skills.

These lessons are created in Adobe PDF format, with form areas where students can interactively fill in their answers using Adobe Acrobat Reader. The lessons may be uploaded to your Google Drive for Google Classroom or made available in an online password-protected environment for your students to download, complete, and electronically return to you either within your system or via email attachment.

Posting these materials in whole or in part in any area of the Internet that is accessible by the general public or by indexing bots is strictly prohibited and is a violation of copyright law.

These are the book divisions used:

Lesson 1   A Storm Breaks, The Population Shrinks

Lesson 2   I Start Over, A Trade Comes My Way, I Go Backwards in Order to Go Forward

Lesson 3   I Am in for a Surprise, I Am Sent East by Northeast, Zella Makes Sense

Lesson 4   I Learn to Think Like a Pig, Bando Finds Some Old Adirondack Furniture, I Become Royalty

Lesson 5   I Get News of Alice, The Dawn Breaks Over Me

Lesson 6   I Am on the Track

Lesson 7   A Bird Talks to Me

This digital unit for On the Far Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George includes 28 separate, digital files:

Introduction - Basic teacher notes & copyright information

Lesson 1 - Vocabulary, study questions, reader response for this section

Lesson 1A - Points to Ponder

Lesson 2 - Vocabulary, study questions, reader response for this section

Lesson 2A - Points to Ponder

Lesson 3 - Vocabulary, study questions, reader response for this section

Lesson 3A - Points to Ponder

Lesson 4 - Vocabulary, study questions, reader response for this section

Lesson 4A - Points to Ponder

Lesson 5 -Vocabulary, study questions, reader response for this section

Lesson 5A - Points to Ponder

Lesson 6 - Vocabulary, study questions, reader response for this section

Lesson 7 - Vocabulary, study questions, reader response for this section

Critical Thinking Questions - Leveled questions: interpretive, critical, critical w/ personal response, personal response

Quotations - Significant quotes to explore

Writing Assignment 1 - Informative writing

Writing Assignment 2 - Persuasive writing

Writing Assignment 3 - Descriptive writing

Nonfiction Assignment - Reading related nonfiction & evaluating it

Project - Sam made many things. Students are to choose something to make and make it.

Tracking Worksheets - Separate worksheets for tracking clues, birds & fish, trees & flowers, edible plants & nuts, mountains & water

Enrichment - Extra activity assignment suggestions

Review - Crossword puzzle and 2 matching worksheets

Digital Lesson PDF File - All the digital lessons in one pdf file

Digital Lesson Google Doc Link - A link to copy the original, editable Google Doc file

Answer Keys - for study questions, vocabulary, crossword, and matching worksheets

Each lesson is its own PDF file, to make giving and collecting individual assignments easier.

Google Classroom Note: The digital interactive PDF lessons are PDF files, not Google Docs. If you open them with Doc Hub in Google Drive, the interactive fill-in spaces are all there. When you open the file in Google Drive, if you right click on the doc, a menu with "Open With" as an option should come up. Doc Hub should be an option there. If it is not, here is a link to how to make it available: