Homeschooling and lifelong education . . . one day at a time
I had a lot of fun considering favorite picture books as I considered the variety of ways one could organize a story. So many times in elementary school kids are given a prescription for writing and they must follow that. Writing is more fun when students are free to organize their thoughts or ideas creatively. Four picture books provide inspiration for young writers by demonstrating different book structures and encouraging students to organize a story uniquely.
If there is one story that my kids love to return to over and over again it is Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I added these favorite Goldilocks characters to our recent kindergarten math activities, making hands-on learning fun and connecting our math lessons in with our story reading activities.
Now that Strawberry is gaining more confidence with the various sounds of the letters of the alphabet, she’s ready for understanding the concepts of digraphs and other multi-letter phonograms. Whistling Whales by Denise Eide introduces the 21 most important multi-letter phonograms and the multiple sounds they produce in English. After reading the picture book together, we enjoyed sorting through our sight words cards to find the phonograms we encountered in the picture book!
When I thought about a persuasive mentor text, my first thought was to go with The Pigeon, Mo Willems’ crabby bird who demands things. I almost dismissed this Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus writing idea because I thought my kids will probably think it is childish, but went I with it anyway. I’m so glad I did! It was so silly that they completely enjoyed it. Mo Willems’ pigeon was was the perfect character for a persuasive writing lesson. You’d think there was a young audience for the book. Revisiting Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! with older kids allowed them to practice writing on a subject that was very humorous!
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