Read Closely Lesson

Last week I used the big book, From Head to Toe, by Eric Carle.  I read the book to the students, we read it together and discussed different aspects of the book each day.  We discussed the pattern of the writing in the book, made a chart of the animals and the body part each moved, and discovered why the author named the book, From Head to Toe.  As a culmination to the book, we used the pattern to create our own version of the book.  The students each selected a pre-cut animal shape.  The used water colors to paint their animal.  They decided what body part the animal would move and how they would move that part.  Then they took all of this and created their own page for our class book.  I took pictures of each student acting like their animal and added that to each page.
 I took pictures of their pages, recorded the class reading the book, and add music to create a video of our book.  The students were so excited to see the end result.  The print book is now in our class library where I am sure it will be read many times this year.

If you would like to see the video, you can click here.

Zero the Hero

Zero the Hero

 Friday was the tenth day of school and boy was it an exciting day.  We received a call from the office that a special package had been delivered for our class.  Our office buddy retrieved the package and the excitement began.   It was Zero the Hero and he came to help celebrate the 10th day of school.  Zero came with a note, a special 0 treat and a cape that one lucky student got to wear for the remainder of the day.  We sang the Zero the Hero song by Dr. Jean and enjoyed the sweet treat.  At the end of the day, Zero left but promised to come back on another zero day.

Our cool Zero the Hero cape