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!

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!

What's A Rhyming Unit WIthout Some Dr. Seuss?

... Not much of a rhyming unit at all, if you ask me! So we finished out the month with There's A Wocket in My Pocket. Again, and easy reader, but one of my favorite read alouds! Seriously! I think I like this one even more than Put Me In the Zoo. The silly words are so much fun (for me), and they draw each and every student in like magic.

My favorite part about reading this one is when I get to stop and ask the students very seriously if they've ever had a "yink in their sink," or a "nooth grush on their tooth brush." You would be amazed how many of them have!

I never know what to expect with each group when we get to the "vug under the rug." I like to lower my voice to a kind of spooky whisper when I read this page. They love it! And they assume I know what that vug under the rug looks like (it remains concealed in the illustrations), like I've got some in with Dr. Seuss and he let me take a peek at it.

You can tell Christmas is in full swing when one of my students insisted that the vug under the rug really was just Santa. She wouldn't let it go.

We had to make some silly creatures of our own to take home! We got to mix and match heads, legs, and bodies of our choosing to make 'em. How fun! They were each unique. One of my students chose to make his creature entirely out of feet pieces!

I let the students come up with rhyming names for their creatures too. That was a little tricky... they came up with some interesting names and rhymes...

Here are some photos:

My poets that Didn't Know it!

The rhyming continues, and my kiddos are getting better at it. Or perhaps just a little more comfortable with it and willing to participate more in our rhyming discussions and activities? Either way, we had fun, full lessons yesterday! And when I say full, I mean we ran like 15 minutes over with each group time. A good problem to have, right? They didn't miss lunch time so it was all good.

We read Put Me In the Zoo (Robert Lopshire). There's not much to this story. It's a limited vocab book, but I love reading it aloud. My students always love it. It doesn't hurt that I bring my plush "Spot the Leopard" along with me when I read this one. Should I be offended that my students have WAY more to say to this plush animal than they seem to have to say to me? Ha!

All my kiddos helped brainstorm great word families that we wrote on Spot's spots. Oh wait, I didn't mention that we made our own Spot the Leopards yet, did I? Well, we did! And here's how some of them looked:

Froggy Party!

November is rhyming month! And working on rhyming skills with the students is always fun for me! And I hope it's as fun for my students as well. I would say we're off to a good start with this week's lesson! Lots of rhyming, and lots of fun!

We read A Frog In A Bog (Karma Wilson). It's a rhyming story and a counting story (as one of my students so keenly pointed out). A frog eats lots of bugs and grows bigger and bigger and bigger. It reminds me of There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly, only instead of the frog dying at the end, he spits out all the bugs and escapes getting eaten by an alligator. Yesss!

We made froggies to help us remember this rhyming lesson, and the students LOVED them! I heard they were talking about them well after they returned to their regular classrooms.

I'm sorry I've been forgetting to bring my camera to class with me lately. I had to sub a photo I took at home after the lesson. :( From looking at the photo you can see the fun "tongue" each frog got. And on the end of the tongue? There was a fly, of course (plastic)!

What's In Your Pocket?

There's a Wocket in mine! ...Well, O.K. not in my pocket, but the little boy in this week's story had a Wocket in his pocket! We read Dr. Seuss' tale There's a Wocket in My Pocket!this week. This is a story FULL of rhymes, and all the kids did an awesome job figuring those rhyming words out!

What surprised me a little bit this week was our discussions we had following our read-aloud of There's a Wocket in My Pocket!. There's not much (if any) plot to this story, just lots of rhymes and fun. And discussing a book that doesn't have much plot is a bit difficult. But the kids were all very opinionated about the creatures in the book. They told me all about which ones they liked, if they had any of these kinds of creatures at their own house (some told me they did), what they would do is there was a "Zower in their shower", etc.

Everybody was excited about hearing last week's story again too! They all demanded that I read it again (that was the plan anyway). They were pros with all the rhymes in it. They pretty much read the story to me. I had to slow some of them down because they were "reading" too far ahead, too quickly!

After we read both of our stories, we made silly creatures like the ones in There's a Wocket in My Pocket!. The children got to create their own unique creature by mixing and matching heads, bodies, and feet of different sorts.

Once the creatures were done, we decided what kind of creatures they were ("A Bofa on the sofa?" "A Ghair under the chair?"). This was a tricky task, so with most of the kids I started a phrase for them and let them figure out the rhyming word to complete it. For example: Is your creature a Muss on a ________? (Answer: bus). This worked well, and once they got the hang of it, many of the kids were coming up with their own rhymes. They were often using made-up words, which was great because most of the words in our book were made-up too!

So we glued, and colored, and rhymed, rhymed, rhymed this week! It was great!

No class next week, but we will wrap up our rhyming unit the week of the 26th!

Old Ladies

We've been reading an awful lot of stories about old ladies lately, haven't we? They've been such fun stories though!

This week we read There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (Caldecott Honor Book). This story kicked off our new rhyming unit! And the children did SO great with this concept!

We explored the rhyming words as we read the story; then we did an activity where we stuffed the old lady's belly full of the animals from the book. The children had to complete the rhyme I gave them (I don't know why she swallowed the...) before they got to stuff that animal into her belly. I think every class got stumped on the last rhyme (the horse one). They had to think hard on some of the other rhymes too, but overall did really well.

I feel really good about this week's start to our rhyming unit. I feel it's going to ease us into the rest of the unit very nicely. Next week will be a little trickier, as we come up with our own rhymes. I'm eager to see how they do with it!


Oh! Almost forgot! I have a cute story to share!

We were re-reading the story The Teeny-Tiny Woman at the beginning of one of our classes, and I read the part about how the teeny tiny woman left her cottage to go for a teeny tiny walk...

Then, later in the story, it says something about the teeny tiny woman walking back to her home. After I read that line, one of the children said, "yeah, back to her home at college."

I stopped for a second when he said this, trying to figure out why he thought the teeny tiny woman lived at a college. Then it dawned on me that he thought I said "college" when I read the word "cottage" earlier in the story! Makes sense. I mean, "cottage" is definitely not a word we use much these days. I can understand how their brains might hear the word "college" instead.

This created a great teachable moment, and we talked about what a cottage is.