A Cub Grows Up

Last week the students did a shared reading of the short story "A Cub Grows Up." The story is from our state textbook series. After reading, they discussed with a partner the different stages of a bear's life and what they can do in each stage. They then wrote Flow Maps individually to retell the story in their own words. After they were finished, they created their own bear cub.

Dory Story: An Ocean Food Chain

As an integrated language arts and science lesson, we read Dory Story by Jerry Pallota. Dory Story is about the adventure of a little boy who gets lost at sea in his dory. On his adventure, he learns all about the ocean's food chain. After reading, the students retold the adventures of the little boy by writing the food chain from the story on a Flow Map. They then illustrated their favorite part of the story. If you get a chance, ask your students how the story ended....they were quite surprised!

The Three Snow Bears

Today in our whole group comprehension lesson we worked on making inferences and drawing conclusions. The students looked at the cover of the book The Three Snow Bears by Jan Brett and discussed what they saw. After discussing that the cover had three bears - a papa, a mama, and a baby - the students were asked if they had ever read a book about three bears. The quickly came up with Goldilocks and The Three Bears. The students then retold the story of Goldilocks to a neighbor. After retelling, we talked about how we can use what we already know to predict what will happen in our new story. After reading a few pages, we would stop to allow the students time to predict what would happen next. To complete our comprehension lesson, we created a Double Bubble Map to compare and contrast the two stories. The students then created their own "snow bear" by only cutting out simple shapes.

Mama's Coming Home

The students used interactive writing to complete a Flow Map about the events in the story Mama's Coming Home. Retelling stories with specific detail is very important to their reading comprehension. You can help at home by having your child draw a Flow Map and fill in the beginning, middle, and ending events of stories that they read.

Up, Up, Up! It's Apple-Picking Time!

Last week we read Up, Up, Up! It's Apple Picking Time! by Jody Fickes Shapiro. The students then worked together to retell in writing what happened at the beginning, middle, and end of the story. The students wrote together using a method called Interactive writing in which the students and teacher take turns sharing the pen and help one another spell. The students then summarized the story in their own words using the shared chart as help. At the end of their comprehension lesson, they created an apple tree. Below are a few examples of the students' work:

Caps for Sale: Retelling Stories

In Reading we have been working on retelling stories from beginning, middle, and end. Last week we read Caps for Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina. After reading the story, the students partnered with a knee-neighbor to orally retell the story. Then, as a class we created a three part chart to summarize the story. The following day, after rereading, the students did Interactive Writing on a Flow Map to summarize the story in their own words. The students then created a foldable to illustrate and write about the events of the story from beginning, middle, and end. Below are a few pictures of their work.

Read with Roy

If you are looking for more strategies to help your child learn to read and write, visit Guided Reading and Reading Games with Roy the Zebra. The website is based on stories about Roy the Singing Zebra. This fun site offers progressive, animated stories along with matching discussion cards, worksheets, and games. The discussion cards are a great way to help your child think about what the story means in order to move beyond literal retells of the story. The games span a wide variety of topics that help in reading and writing including focuses on capital letters, punctuation, vowel sounds, blends, and rhyming words.

The Napping House

This week we read The Napping House by Audrey Wood to learn more about cause and effect. We learned that cause is why something happened and that effect is what happened. After reading the book through, the class made a Multi-Flow Map to retell the key events and discussed how each event caused another event to happen. The students then chose their favorite cause and effect from the story to write and illustrate about. Below are a few examples of their quality work:

The Mitten

Last week we read The Mitten by Jan Brett to practice retelling a story. After reading the story several times, we worked as a class to create a Multi-Flow map of the story's main events. The students then worked in partners to create their own mittens. On their mittens, they wrote one key event from the story which we then pieced together in order.