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!

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.

Let the Christmas Reading Fun Begin!

It's all about predicting this month! And we're doing it Christmas style! Well, the story I read last week wasn't specifically a Christmas story, but it was a version of "The Gingerbread Man." Christmas-ish, right? I think so. (Oh, and we also read Mr. Willoughby's Christmas Tree.)

My students were so into the predicting stuff. Each one of them insisted on taking a turn making a prediction before each story. And they would state their predictions like this, "My prediction is..." I loved that they were using a new vocab word, but I swear, I didn't tell them to phrase their predictions like that, though it was awfully cute!

I think this unit's off to a jolly start! I'm really happy with the effort all my students put in last week. And we had so much predicting fun that both my group times ran over by about 15 minutes (thank goodness for understanding classroom teachers).

See below for a glimpse at our take home activity to help remind us of our gingerbread fun!

The Hat - Lesson Reflection

The Hat, by Jan Brett, was a hit... as anticipated (See Tuesday's post for a review of the book). Here are some thoughts about yesterday's predicting lesson:

•  My first group session was a little crazy. The students just got so excited during our activity we did during the read-aloud. They had a difficult time staying seated and staying quiet long enough for me to read each page. I mean, I love that they're so engrossed in the story and our activity, but I don't enjoy having to say, "On your bottom, please," over and over... and over.

• I gave the students complete creative freedom with their "hats" and puppet. No regrets there.
  

• Keeping the order during a unit on predicting proves to be quite tricky, because each child is eager to get their prediction out first as we go through each story. I hate to enforce strict rules about raising hands and what-not too much, because I want them to feel free to chime in and say what they're thinking, and I want it to be fun. But perhaps I need to put more focus on this?

• Conversations between the puppets were a riot!
  

• Yesterday we used some paper puppets to do predicting during The Hat. The students each couldn't wait for it to be their turn to predict with their animal puppet. After one student's turn had passed, he immediately said, "Can we read the story again?" I said, "We still are reading the story!" I love when they are so blantantly excited about our story and what we're doing. Motivating and Empowering readers?? Check!

• The clothesline activity I came up with added the perfect element of fun, and helped with comprehension. I loved it. 

• This lesson would be so much fun with even one child. Oh, the possibilities! I can't wait till Isaac is old enough to play around with these activities!
  

• Yes, he purposely put the stocking over the hen's eyes.

Again, detailed instructions for this read-aloud and activities will be available soon!

The Hat, by Jan Brett... A Review

Photo by Denis Defreyne

Thanks goodness for a great children's book to warm me up on a winter day. Oooo... how I love me a Jan Brett story! The Mitten is usually a staple of every preschool teacher's library, and it should be. It's a beautiful book. So beautiful, that for a long time, I ignored Jan Brett's book The Hat. Big mistake!

The Hat opens with a little girl, Lisa, hanging all her woolen clothes on the clothesline. When the wind blows one of her stockings off the line, it ends up stuck on the head of an adorable hedgehog, Hedgie. An embarrassed, Hedgie, tries to casually pass the stocking off as a hat when he is mocked by various other animals he runs into throughout the story. Do the other animals buy into Hedgie's story? You'll see when you reach the fun surprise ending!

Brett's illustrations are in her signature style, complete with detailed vignette's that add important details to the story beyond the text. In these vignettes we see Lisa searching for her missing stocking. We also see what's happening with the animals Hedgie visits with, after they have run off.

A big part of what makes Brett's books so much fun is the expression she conveys on the faces of the animals she illustrates. I love seeing the silly story of what's going on in the animals' fictional world, juxtaposed against the tale of Lisa, going about her business in a realistic human world. When these two worlds mingle at the end of the story, it's a perfect climax to the book. I really love that element Jan Brett uses in her books.

This story works great with our predicting unit because the details of Brett's illustrations give many clues which we can base our predictions on. And I think my students love this story even more than The Mitten. In previous years it's been one they have talked about for months after hearing it. They just love Hedgie! And who wouldn't?

We'll be reading this story in class tomorrow. Stay tuned to hear how our lesson went. I'll be posting about it later this week, complete with photos!