Look at the cover. Discuss what the boy is doing in the picture. Ask what the word trying means and if they have any connections with trying something before. How did they feel? Did they give up? Did they keep working and get better at it?

Read a couple of pages, and model a connection from the story.

Read a couple more pages, and have students turn and talk with a partner about a connection they made from reading.

If students are new to summarizing, talk to them about story elements such as character(s), setting, problem, and solution. (Depending on the age group and their exposure to summarizing, discussing story elements might need to be done in individual lessons.) After discussing what story elements are, put them all together to create a summary of this book.

• Characters: boy and old sculptor 
• Setting: watching a sculptor in a studio 
• Problem: boy wants to create something beautiful,but thinks his creations aren’t very good 
• Solution: boy keeps trying and gets better over time

• This book is mostly a dialogue between the boy and the sculptor. Talk with students about focusing on quotation marks and the punctuation at the end of each sentence.
• The dialogue can be read with a lot of emotion. 
• A lot of questions are asked in this story. Explain how your voice goes up when a question is asked.

Many interesting words are used throughout this book: simply, incredible, opportunity, experience, disappointment, necessary, proven, terrible, emerging, perseverance, progress, confided, worthwhile, treasure