I always have high hopes of getting my lesson plans done way ahead of time, but that hardly ever happens. I'm always burning the midnight oil the night before class. That's especially true lately with us beginning our
adoption from Ethiopia. Oi! So fun, but SO tiring!
So if you're looking for something to do next Tuesday night, head on over to my house and I'll put you to work. Come on now, it will be fun! Take a look and see...
O.K. So we're reading
The Apple Pie That Papa Baked (Lauren Thompson). I want to make some story pieces... Do I have some felt? Let's look in one of my craft drawers here. Yikes! Messy!
What am I thinking? Felt is going to be
way hard to make these out of this late. Let's see if I have any card stock. Yes! I do. And it's cream colored too. It'll coordinate nicely with Jonathan Bean's illustrations in the book. Note to self though: You're running dangerously low on card stock and construction paper. Buy more!!
I feel like I've been using lots of homemade story cards lately. I sometimes get stuck on something like that when it comes to my lessons. Ah well. It always works great and the kids have fun with it. That's all that matters. Let's slice up this card stock!
Bucket o' crayons? There you are! I'll keep with the color scheme used in the book and use black, brown, and red. Sorry carnation pink and cerulean. Maybe next time!
Mmmm! Pie! My drawing looks good enough to eat!
Whew! That took way less time than fussing with felt, and accomplishes the same thing... perhaps even better than the left would have. I'm more than satisfied with how these story cards turned out.
I'll snip the end off this broken jump rope, and grab some clothespins...
Throw everything in my bag and I'm all ready to go for tomorrow!
Be sure to come back and see what we did with all this!
... I always end up with happy students! Yeah, so I don't always have my lessons ready weeks in advance. What teacher does? My students don't know that though. Nor do they care. They just care that I come to class with super cool books, and super fun stuff to do with those cool books!
This week's story was The Apple Pie That Papa Baked by Lauren Thompson. We discussed the format, how the book starts at the end of the story (or process of making apple pie) and works back to the beginning. Then we used story cards to put the steps of making an apple pie in order.
Each student got to take a turn clipping their story card onto our story line (jump rope), and at the end we ended up with the complete story line pictured above. 
Then we told our own story. Our story began, "On the last day of summer vacation I..." Each student took a turn adding something to the story, after each addition we recapped all the previous additions to the story. There were lots of giggles when someone tried to sneak something in about going "potty" on their turn. Ah, to be a preschooler again.
