Old Ladies

We've been reading an awful lot of stories about old ladies lately, haven't we? They've been such fun stories though!

This week we read There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (Caldecott Honor Book). This story kicked off our new rhyming unit! And the children did SO great with this concept!

We explored the rhyming words as we read the story; then we did an activity where we stuffed the old lady's belly full of the animals from the book. The children had to complete the rhyme I gave them (I don't know why she swallowed the...) before they got to stuff that animal into her belly. I think every class got stumped on the last rhyme (the horse one). They had to think hard on some of the other rhymes too, but overall did really well.

I feel really good about this week's start to our rhyming unit. I feel it's going to ease us into the rest of the unit very nicely. Next week will be a little trickier, as we come up with our own rhymes. I'm eager to see how they do with it!


Oh! Almost forgot! I have a cute story to share!

We were re-reading the story The Teeny-Tiny Woman at the beginning of one of our classes, and I read the part about how the teeny tiny woman left her cottage to go for a teeny tiny walk...

Then, later in the story, it says something about the teeny tiny woman walking back to her home. After I read that line, one of the children said, "yeah, back to her home at college."

I stopped for a second when he said this, trying to figure out why he thought the teeny tiny woman lived at a college. Then it dawned on me that he thought I said "college" when I read the word "cottage" earlier in the story! Makes sense. I mean, "cottage" is definitely not a word we use much these days. I can understand how their brains might hear the word "college" instead.

This created a great teachable moment, and we talked about what a cottage is.