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!

 

Big Monster! Big Hit!

This week's story, Go Away, Big Green Monster!by Ed Emberley, was a big hit! In this book, we slowly see a monster face appear as we turn each page. And then once we see the monster's complete face, we make him disappear!

Upon finishing this read-aloud I always hear "Read it again! Read it again!" Ah! Music to my ears! And so we did read it again. During our second reading, I had the children help me create the monsters face in the middle of our circle. I passed out pieces of the monsters face (teeth, hair, eyes) and they had to listen for their piece to be mentioned in the story, and then add it to the monster's face.

Then we played Monster Stomp! We took turns pulling words from our story from the "monster box," and reading the words aloud. Each word the box was a part of the monster's face, and there was a picture to accompany to word, which helped with the "reading."

There was one piece in the box that I told them NOT to pull out - the piece with the monster's entire face on it!! Yikes! This piece scares me! But of course, the children all tried their best to pull that monster face out of the box on their turn. Every time somebody pulled out that piece we yelled "MONSTER!" and stomped our feet to get him to go back in the box.

This lesson is SO much fun, not only for the children, but for me too! It allows me to use my amazing acting skills (O.K., maybe not so amazing...) and really ham up our activities. That's the best!

Toward the end of the week, while were playing Monster Stomp, somebody pulled the monster from the box. So we all yelled and stomped, and when the monster went back in the box, I asked the children (using those amazing acting skills) to please not pull him out again because "my heart couldn't take it." Well, one of the little girls was really listening when I said this, and wanted to mimic my dramatics. So the next time the monster was pulled from the box she put her hands to her chest and said, "Oh! Don't take my heart!" to the monster! And she continued to say it every time the monster was pulled from the box. It made me giggle!

Go Away, Big Green Monster!Is definitely another book they're going to be talking about for a while! I think next week's lesson is going to be great fun as well!