Fiction Readers: A Road Trip to Yosemite

A Road Trip to Yosemite is a realistic fiction story about a family going on a road trip together. Along the way, they discuss the directions leading up to their destination. They visited family, stopped to look at the views, and finally arrived at Yosemite Valley. When they went into the valley, the GPS cut out, and they lost signal…then they saw a bear! The story is narrated with illustrations, illustrative text, and directions.

A Road Trip to Yosemite is a simple narrative story. Illustrations match the text. Draw students’ attention to the visual features including the capitalization of some words, layout and design. Opportunities arise to discuss giving directions based on road names (Highway 20) and distance (200 miles). 

Readers develop vocabulary such as adjectives (windier) and numbers written as words (thirty). Focus on suffixes and base words (fidgeted) and abbreviations (GPS). Opportunities arise to discuss apostrophes within contractions (whoever’s), capital letters at the beginning of sentences and names (Yosemite National Park), exclamation marks, question marks, and commas.

This title is from the Fiction Readers series from Teacher Created Materials. Stimulate the imagination and promote creative thinking through real-world themes captured in entertaining stories.