Meaningful Literacy Experiences - Winter Style!

Jan Brett's The Hat

This horse is wishing for a "hat" like Hedgie's.

He can find one on the clothesline!

Hedgie laughs and says, "Don't they know that animals should never wear clothes?"

Denise Fleming's The First Day of Winter

Predicting (our focus during the month of January) what snowman accessories are hidden under the sheet.

... Then dressing up like silly snowmen!

Other Fun

Writing a letter for The Jolly Christmas Postman (Allen and Janet Ahlberg) to deliver!

Enjoying some good books by the fire during the month of December.

I can read with my rebus reader!

Digging for the alphabet!

Getting Cozy In December

December is all about print awareness. We are learning about the purpose print serves and practicing our hand at "reading" and "writing" our own print!

Last week we read The Jolly Christmas Postman by Allan and Janet Ahlberg. I let the kids play with all the fun pieces in the pockets within the book. We played a game of Bingo (our version was called "MAIL") that had the finding each word on their game cards (with the assistance of pictures). After the game we "wrote" our own letter to be mailed or delivered ourselves. The kids adored getting to mess around with my notepads and fancy pens and envelopes.

This week we read The Three Bears' Christmas by Kathy Duval. The kids got a kick out of this fun twist on the classic fairy tale. After I read it to them, then they got their own rebus reader version to read with me. They all did fantastic with it! Better than I imagined. What really impressed me was how they all wanted to read it with me. I worried that it might be an activity that wouldn't really hold their interest, but they loved it and really took ownership of it. I sent them home with the assignment of reading it to someone at their house. They all seemed to take that very seriously, and so I can't wait to hear how their reading went when I see them again next week.

I had a blast making this fun little faux fireplace to take to class with me this month. The idea behind it was that I wanted to use this as a spring board for talking up the idea of curling up with a good book, in a cozy place, during the winter months. I brought in a bunch of Christmas books and laid them around the fireplace, and as they finished their work and headed over to have a look, I chatted with them about where they like to read at home. It kind of took a funny turn when I heard about some of the places their mommies and daddies like to read too (the bathroom). I love that my students have great reading role models at home! I will bring my fireplace again next week and see if I can entice a few more students to curl up with a book in front of it!

We had our last lesson for December this past week. Boy, did I over plan for this one! We were only able to do ONE of my two planned activities because it took so long. Good problem to have though. We had a lot of fun with the one activity we did.

Our story was Christmas Counting, by Lynn Reiser. I'm not usually one for concept books when it comes to Literacy Launchpad lessons, but this book is one exception. We counted while we decorated our tree... like the one in the book! (See above photo.) Well, the tree in the book grew and grew each year, and our tree stayed the same size. AND ours was a fake tree... So it wasn't just like the one in the book, I guess. :) But it was still cool.

We counted ornaments as we adorned the tree with them. The students each had their favorite set of ornaments, and there was some bickering over who got to put what ornaments on the tree. I don't know why this activity took so long, but it did. Lots of chatting. That's a good thing!

Oh, and we predicted again, of course! We predicted how the family would grow each year, and what they would put on their tree. I was really happy to see the students using cues from the text and illustrations to guide their predictions.

I'll be taking a blogging break till next week. Till then, thought I would share a few Christmas photos of me and my Little Reader.