New, Fabulous Halloween Book and Activity!

Charlotte Gunnufson sent us a copy of her new book Halloween Hustle and the kids and I have been enjoying it immensely. I have actually had to get onto my kids a bit about them dragging the book all over the house (and out to the car on errand trips), before I got a chance to post a review while the book still looked nice and new!

I planned to sit down and read and play with the book today with My Little Reader since it's aimed at kids around his age (he's in kindergarten). But my older son (9) couldn't resist the fun and wanted to join us too! 

I thought it would be fun to make our own little skeletons that could do the Halloween Hustle as we read the story, and fall down just like the skeleton in the book. My Little Reader decided he wanted to make a mummy like the one in the book. After some hard work, and a couple revisions, he had it the way he wanted. We each attached our creations to popsicle sticks for marionette-style puppets. 

I used simple white yarn (because that's what I had in my craft cabinet) to attach the mummy and skeleton to the popsicle stick handles. We punched holes and used twisty ties (again, using what I had handy) to make the puppets' joints move so they could hustle. 

Isn't that an adorable mummy? I think so!

The story is full of fun and whimsical Halloween-type characters that are headed to a party on Halloween night (warning: there is a zombie in the story that is a little on the gross side). While observing the cover, My Little Reader wondered how the skeleton would be able to dance without falling apart since he has no skin or muscles, and he was right on the money with his wonderings. Turns out the skeleton has quite the trouble staying put together as he dances through this tale. 

The rhyming text makes it lots of fun. And we love that it has a happy ending for the skeleton. 

And it really says something when my nine year old thinks a picture book is cool enough to sit and listen to mom read it. 

The skeleton would be easy enough to use even without the string and popsicle sticks attached. You could make the jointed skeleton out of card stock and simply let your child hold him with his hands and make him dance. Be sure you use card stock - I don't think regular paper, or even construction paper, would be heavy enough to work very well. 

I have included a pattern for the skeleton that I made (below). I do not have a pattern for the mummy My Little Reader made. But your little reader could make their own mummy, or could create a puppet based on another character in the book. You could make all the characters and do a puppet show of the story!

Check out the book trailer here!

And learn how to do the "Halloween Hustle" here!



Have fun! And I would love to see some pics of your puppets you make!

Ideas for Summer Book Fun!

Can I show you what we've been doing in class this past month? I can't believe I will be trading the preschool classroom for the homeschool classroom. It feels very weird, but exciting. And I'm thrilled that I will get to invest more time and energy into creating fun and meaningful literature experiences for my little guy AND my older kids!

I am also scheming to continue visiting my beloved schools for some special story times throughout the year so I don't suffer any terrible withdrawal effects!

So here's the fun we've been having this past month:

We had so much fun reading Chalk (Bill Thomson)! Huge hit with the kids. Oh, the fun they had imagining what it would be like to have their chalk drawings come to life! So much imagining and pretending. We drew with "magic" chalk of our own and pretended our drawings came to life. The students begged me to reread this one all month long!

Blackout (John Rocco) was another hit! I felt like this story was my son's own personal story: a boy wants to play a game with someone, but everybody in his family is too wrapped up in their technology to be bothered. Then the power goes out. Suddenly life slows down, the family comes together to have fun and pass the time during the blackout.  I think all modern kids can likely identify with this story! We turned out the lights after we read the story and made shadow puppets like they did in the story. My students were amazed by this. Then we took a picture of a city with the lights on, and turned the lights back on with our neon paints! Again, amazement from the students! And the pictures turned out so cool! Even my big kids had fun with this project when I came home with the extra supplies. We read the book around our kitchen table quite a few times!

Like Chalk, Walrus (Stephen Savage) is a wordless book. A Walrus escapes from the zoo and must hide form the zookeeper. He discovers his passion and finds a way to fulfill it while remaining at the zoo, so all ends well. The kids just crack up at the silly places the walrus hides and tries to disguise himself. So simple, but so entertaining! I brought little walruses, made out of craft foam, for us to hunt for in the classroom. Who would have thought the kids would love this so much? We also made pictures where the kids had to illustrate a way to disguise their foam walrus. Many of them took their inspiration from the book and made scenes similar to Savage. But some came up with some new ides of their own. When we finished crafting, they all wanted to take turns hiding the walruses around the room again. So if you're looking for a way to keep some preschoolers busy - hide some walruses! Ha!

A Wintery Print Awareness Unit

January turned out to be one of those fabulous teaching months where all my lesson plans went even better than I could have imagined when I planned them! The kids had an awesome month of learning and loving books! We focused on print awareness as we read tales that took us to winter wonderlands. (Hey, at least we got to experience winter weather somehow, right?).

We one we read All You Need for a Snowman by Alice Schertle There are so many wonderful snowmen books out there, but this on remains a favorite of mine... and my students! They always love the interactive quality of it - insisting on the additional elements you need to complete a snowman. It's a great discussion starter with the group and keeps them fully engaged.



 We talked about different forms of print we use and see: newspapers, letters, grocery lists, etc. We also talked about words in the books we read and how they never change. We did crayon-resist watercolor painting with this lesson, and had to discover what pictures and words were hidden on our paper. The kids thought this was absolutely magical!

Week two we read The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. I love sharing this classic, especially since many of my students usually haven't read it yet. This year I checked out a bunch of copies from the library (yay for there always being lots of copies of Caldecott books) and each student was able to follow along with me as I read it aloud. As I read the story, I had the students hunt for certain words and/or letters within the text - like a little scavenger hunt. They loved this, and did so great with it!




 Then we played in the snow! Woohoo! Faux snow is always a hit! We had to get all suited up first and put on all the same kind of snow gear that Peter wore. We tried to do the things Peter did in the snow (but on a smaller scale - we used our fingers). And then we just were silly and played. I could barely tear the kids away from the snow when it was time to leave class. What a special lesson that always is!

The last week we read The Snow Globe Family by Jan O'Connor. This was a new one for our winter-reading repertoire, but was a big hit! It was probably everyone's favorite for January. The kids just really enjoyed the wonder of imagining the people inside a snow globe being real and having their own little life. They loved the part where the baby shakes the snow globe and sends the snow globe family flying, along with all their furniture!





Somehow I managed not to get any photos of this week's lesson. But we used our imaginations to create our own little snow globe world. We used paper plates as our globes and drew on them with crayons. Then we added cotton balls (stretched and torn) to make snow in them. We used construction paper as the stand for the snow globe and put our names in glitter at the bottom. You can't do a print awareness unit without having some print fun with the students' names! I let the kids do the glitter process, and they thought it was the coolest when they finally shook the excess glitter off and there was their name - all SPARKLY! They were positively beaming!

A fantastic unit... and now I have to try to stay on par this month. I've got my work cut out for me!


What's your favorite wintery book to read with your students or kiddos at home?

Lessons in Rhyming and Predicting

We spent November of Literacy Launchpad having all kinds of rhyming fun. And December was spent predicting, predicting, predicting!

I've been revamping my lesson plans as I go this year to give them a new twist, and try to help my students understand the skill we're practicing each month even better. These activities mentioned briefly in this post would be perfect to be incorporated into your preschool classroom curriculum, or even to be used at home with your own kiddos.

November had us reading Rhyming Dust Bunnies (Jan Thomas), I'm Your Bus (Marilyn Singer), and Each Peach Pear Plum (Allan and Janet Ahlberg). How much do I love Rhyming Dust Bunnies? A better question would be "How much do my students love it?" The answer: A LOT! We couldn't get enough of this one and its sequel Here Comes the Big, Mean Dust Bunny!.  I'm Your Bus was another great one for allowing my students to predict and fill-in the rhyme that would end each page's text.

 We brainstormed rhyming words, made rhyming buses, hunted for hidden rhymes in a drawing, and made rhyming signs that were fun to hold up proudly each time we heard rhyming words in our stories.

Then in December we moved on to predicting and read some more fab books. We read If You Take a Mouse to Movies (Laura Numeroff), Mr. Willoby's Christmas Tree (Robert Barry), and Snowmen at Christmas (Caralyn Buehner). It worked out great to choose some rhyming books in December to help continue giving us practice with that skill w had just recently been focusing on the previous month. Is there anything better at Christmas time than some great Christmas books to hunker down with? So cozy. So fun. 

We did most of our predicting practice as we read our stories each week, and then we had crafty fun to follow-up our stories. I love how these fun crafts and activities with literature help my students to forever remember these great books that we read in class each week. We recycled like Mr. Willowby and made some awesome Christmas tree ornaments out of egg cartons that would have otherwise been thrown out. We also got creative making adorable snowmen ornaments after being inspired by all the cute snowmen in Caralyn Buehner's book. And we did some drawings to do our predicting with If You Take a Mouse to the Movies! There were a couple rhyming games thrown in there too! What a full and exciting month we had!

Beginning, Middle, End and A Spooky Month of Reading

My Literacy Launchpad students love a good spooky story... or a not-too-spooky story in this case. This month we learned about story structure and beginning, middle, end as we read some stories that had a hint of spook to them.

The month started out with some Creepy Carrots (Aaron Reynolds). What happens when a greedy little rabbit takes too many carrots from Crackenhopper Field? The carrots from Crackenhopper Field start following him and creeping him out... or do they? Is it just Jasper Rabbit's imagination? This one was the favorite for the month by a lot of my students. I loved reading it aloud, which was great because they asked me to read it many times over the course of the month! It's fun to vary my tone, volume, and inflections for dramatic effect with a spooky story!

We did a lot of practice with arranging the parts of Creepy Carrots in order - beginning, middle, end. The kids seemed to catch on really quickly to this concept. We made a poster where we broke up the parts of the story into beginning, middle, end. Then we made our own creepy carrots to take home with us, and put the parts of the story in the correct order on the back.

The next week we read Go Away, Big Green Monster (Ed Emberley)! Another hit with the kiddos! We read this one many times too! We played a game called "Monster Stomp" and then after our game we turned our classroom into a monster making factory. BUT... we weren't scared of our monsters. We could make them go away whenever we wanted. Plus, some of them were nice, friendly, smiling monsters. 

We continued to talk about story structure as we read The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything as our last story of the month. This read-aloud was hysterical, because I got some big jumps out of the students when I read the "Boo!!" part of the story to them! Every time! I love that. 

We had to remember all the parts of our story as we played a game where we pieced together the scarecrow from the book. We had a lot of laughs with that game, and got our scarecrow put together all handsome... errr scary! Then we made our own books. We had to remember again all the parts of the story, but we had the words in our books to help us. And now we can take our books home and make our friends and family jump when we read the "Boo!" part to them!

 

Michael Finnegan

I'm still playing catch-up with keeping you all posted on what we've been up to in class.

At the end of September we wrapped up our Names unit with a book based on one of the most fun, rhyming, names, songs - There Once Was A Man Named Michael Finnegan. There are certain books that are just more fun to read aloud, and this is one of them. I kind of sang the song as I read the text. The kids stayed riveted the entire time. I love those kinds of lessons.

We made Michael Finnegan puppets out of paper plates, complete with whiskers that grow out and in again! So. Much. Fun. We sang the song lots of times as we played with our puppets. What wonderful rhyming practice!

End of Summer Literacy Fun

My first summer with three kids was... interesting. I had lofty plans for activities and learning, but most of them didn't happen. We did have fun celebrating summer today though with some reading and a little field trip.

We got a couple books from the library about ice cream, and read a little on the subject before we headed out to visit our local dairy plant.

I must admit, we were a bit disappointed in our visit to the dairy plant. There was no actual tour. Their idea of a "tour" was to let us watch a video on how they make their various dairy products. Kind of lame.

But we took a picture with a (fake) cow!

And we got free ice cream! So it wasn't a total bust. Turns out they don't even make ice cream at the plant we visit. They make it in Chattanooga.

Anyhow, we decided to go up to the store and buy some rock salt so we could make ice cream ourselves. We found directions online for making ice cream without an ice cream maker (because we don't have one), using just ziploc baggies, rock salt, and then stuff pretty much everybody has around the kitchen (ice cubes, milk, sugar, and vanilla). I was pretty skeptical as to whether this was actually going to work or not, but it did! I ended up doing all the shaking, because the bags were too heavy for the three year old and my two big kids were busy teaching themselves the Cha-Cha Slide (don't ask). It only took five minutes though! And it was really yummy! Downside: It didn't make very much, and it melted REALLY fast.

Here's Isaac giving a "thumbs up" (we'll have to work on that) for his ice cream.

Other books about ice cream:

The Ice Cream King by Steve Metzger and Julie Downing

I Am An Ice Cream Truck by Ace Landers

Milk to Ice Cream by Inez Snyder

Wemberly's Ice Cream Star by Kevin Henkes

I Like Ice Cream by Robin Pickering

Should I Share My Ice Cream by Mo Willems

From Cow to Ice Cream by Bertram T. Knight

Ice Cream by Elisha Cooper

Yummy Ice Cream: A Book About Sharing by Emma Quay and Anna