When I was in elementary school, my aunt and uncle lived in Boston. We would travel to Plymouth (because I begged each year) to visit the recreated Plymouth Plantation during the summer. Ever since, I have loved learning about the lives of the early colonists. Now that I am teaching, I enjoy focusing on the Pilgrims and Plymouth Plantation during the month of November. We often read three books off and on over the course of the month: Samuel Eaton’s Day, Tapenum’s Day, & Sarah Morton’s Day. These three books are written from the child’s point of view and are highly engaging because of the real photographs. The children in all three books are based off of a real child who lived in Plymouth long ago. Depending on the grade level you teach, these books can be read from cover to cover (they’re quite long) or by simply focusing on specific parts. When teaching first grade and kindergarten, I pick certain pages to read every few days. When teaching third grade, I would read half of one book during our real aloud. My favorite way to use this book to teach about the way pilgrim children dressed. Samuel Eaton’s Day gives a step-by-step process of how Continue Reading
Fall is my favorite time of year! My students are working hard, we have established our rules and procedures for a month or so, and…we get to teach about pumpkins! Little Boo is a brilliant book that I just discovered last year. It is about a pumpkin seed named Boo who travels through many seasons of the year as he transforms into a pumpkin. Ladies and gentlemen, this book is amazing. Talk about content integration at your fingertips! This fiction story will allow your students to truly see the cycles that a pumpkin seed goes through to become a great big orange pumpkin. I plan to use this book as an introduction to our two-week pumpkin life cycle unit which begins in the middle of October. After reading the book, I will introduce each stage of the pumpkin and connect it to this text. During the last week of the unit, I always host “Pumpkin Day” for students and any parent volunteers. We transform the classroom into a pumpkin paradise complete with about 10 different pumpkin math, literacy, and science centers. On this day, the class plants individual seeds into a small clear cup at one of the center rotations. We water the seeds Continue Reading
Because August marks the beginning of the school year and we are just starting to focus on classroom rules, I love reading Interrupting Chicken! This book is all about…how did you guess??…an interrupting chicken. The little chicken wants a bedtime story, but he constantly interrupts his father throughout the book. David Ezra Stein uses powerful illustrations and speech bubbles to show how and when the little chicken interrupts. I use Interrupting Chicken during the first week of school to teach students the importance of being respectful and not interrupting others. There is some repetition throughout the book which helps students to participate actively the entire time. One of my favorite aspects of this book is the fact that the chicken appears inside a book inside of the book! This is an excellent opportunity to show students the difference between the actual book and the story within the book. My students are always thrilled to read this story again and again! After we have read the book one time, I show my class this video as a review. Then, we use this freebie from Mrs. Wheeler (see the pictures above) to apply the book to our real lives. We sort the Continue Reading