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Thursday, April 29, 2010

My Little Reader's Not-A-Box

I pulled Not A Box (Antoinette Portis) off the shelf this week and have been reading it with My Little Reader. We read this one last month in Literacy Launchpad. And I didn't really have any plans to do a Literacy Launchpad at-home lesson with My Little Reader with this particular book. I simply wanted to read it with him. But when I saw how much he loved it, the wheels turned.

As you may know, Not A Box is a story about a rabbit that imagines that his big, cardboard box is anything but a box. "It's not a box!" Instead it's a car, a robot, a burning building, a hot air balloon, a rocket...

My Little Reader is moving into that stage where he is memorizing text from the books we read over and over, and he will "read" the books with me. Not A Box lends itself well to this, because "it's not a box" is repeated over and over throughout the book. Very simple text. I love congratulating My Little Reader when he reads with me. " What a good reader you are," I tell him.

"Wanna go see if we have a big box to play with?" I asked My Little Reader. Oh boy, did he ever! He waited very impatiently as I dug through the garage looking for a couple boxes. I had an idea.

My Little Reader loves play houses*, and I was pretty sure I could concoct one out of a couple large boxes. Turned out to be pretty easy (doesn't hurt that My Little Reader isn't very particular about most things yet). I used an box cutter to make a door and a window, and then a little bit of tape to hold my boxes together and... voila!







He's been having a blast coloring the inside and outside of the box. All this fun has been keeping him busy, which is an added bonus. And I'm thinking we can still transform the "not-a-box" into something else after he gets tired of imagining it as a house!


* We were at the park this week and there were little house-like structures built around the all the garage cans. My Little Reader kept wanting to go in the "house." Ugh! Yuck!

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