The Picture Book a Day Challenge

PASS IT ON, written by Marilyn Sadler and illustrated by Michael Slack, reminds me of the old game classroom telephone. You know, teacher whispers a silly message to a student, student tells next student and so on and so on. The last student then announces the message to the whole class.  The message is always mixed up and the teacher makes the point that gossip is not reliable. In PASS IT ON, Cow is stuck on a fence and Bee must get help. The message gets passed on from character to character. This story created a classroom gigglefest. The illustrations are super cute.  The picture of Cow stuck is particularly funny. but one particular illustration grabbed my attention immediately. I have noticed my students struggle to retell stories and then I saw the page below. It was the perfect teaching opportunity. I displayed the story on the Elmo and my students practiced retelling it with a partner using this page as a guide. What started out as a fun read ended up becoming an i...

A colleague at work went book shopping and bought a ton of really great brand new books for our classrooms.  YAY! I love new books! I dare you to read BACK TO SCHOOL WITH BIGFOOT without smiling. You won't be able to do it.  Big Foot is nervous about going back to school and worries about the usual stuff--making a mistake at lunch, missing the bus and back to school shopping (finding shoes is especially tough). This book is so fun to read and easy to relate to. The illustrations are great--Big Foot is adorable, not scary at all. I wish I had discovered this sooner because I would have loved to read it the first week of school. Great read and the perfect addition to my library.

I shared WHEN WILL IT SNOW by Bruce Hiscock with my class today for the 50th day of the picture book a day challenge.  This book is very special to me. I studied it extensively for a Children's Lit class I took while getting my BA at MSU and it was one of the stories responsible for my love  and enthusiasm for of picture books. I love the wintry, rustic feel the story has and knew my students would immediately take to it. The story is about a little boy who is waiting for snow. He watches the skies and helps his family with winter chores which include feeding a three-legged fox--we talked about the three-legged fox for almost a half hour.  They laughed because many of them have never even seen a fox, much less a three-legged one! My students loved this story because it was so different from their city-dwelling lives. They couldn't believe that some people heat their homes with wood. Many have fireplaces but only use them as almost decorative supplemental heat to th...

Cute, cute, cute. Working together is twice the fun. This adorable story is a must read for anyone who has read THE BIGGEST PUMPKIN EVER. It was the perfect pick to set the tone for the month of December--my students are in the Christmas mood but are less impressed with each other. Stories about friendship, teamwork and respect are always very useful in the classroom right now. 

Desmond and Clayton from THE BIGGEST PUMPKIN EVER are back in this snowy sequel.  I have to admit, I have had this story in my classroom forever. For whatever reason, I hadn't read it but a student requested I read it so I did. Just as I started realizing that this was a sequel, another student pointed it out. They asked me to reread Pumpkin too. We ended up completing a Venn Diagram and compared the similarities and differences of the two stories.  Shhh! don't tell anyone but there is another one out there. Can't wait to share the next one.