Blog, Week of September 28
(Teachers please tell your parents about this blog series. It will encourage quality reading at home.)
In my blog last week, I gave you my definition for reading: “Reading is interacting with the printed page to make meaning.”
The key word is interacting. And the interaction comes from the children’s own past experiences Young children need to interact if they are to find meaning. Reading is not a passive act. We must set up connections between the child and the story so they can see its meaning in their own lives.
Remember the “gist”. The gist is how expert readers function, they find the meaning, the key idea. Don’t let your beginning reader get bogged down in the words or sounds. After they check out the sounds take them back to the meaning.
Head Start Research
Children involved in a Head Start interactive small groups who shared picture book reading had highly significant results in their knowledge of the language they had read and their understanding of the concepts. (Whitehurst, 1997) The success of Head Start pre-reading programs has been convinc ingly demonstrated. “We consider the intervention to have been a resounding success.” (Whitehurst)
Talking about and sharing stories with young children results in significant payoffs for their future as fluent readers.
Read Stories with Feeling
Read with feeling. Get into it. G the characters in the story. Make up accents, even if they don’t quite fit the story. Use different hats, puppets, or stand and then sit. The children will love it. And don’t feel you have to read every last word of the text, if some descriptions are too long for a particular child or a particular length of time, pass over them and stick to the action. If you can manage it, go and observe a professional story teller. Notice their eye contact with the audience. Notice how they use their voice.
The story for today is Make Way for Ducklings by Robert McCloskey.
This winner of the Golden Caldecott Medal brings elements of rural and urban life together, it not only tells a great tale but remains timeless in its telling. The story follows Mr. & Mrs. Mallard, a realistically portrayed duck couple. The two settle on a small metropolitan island to lay their eggs. Once hatched, it's up to Mrs. Mallard and her troop to walk to their new home in the central park with the help of their local police force.
The Concept I have chosen is Belonging: it is good for living things to have a comfortable place to be and to know they belong.
Activity 1: Make ten cards, each with a word or phrase and a picture of the following: soap, a cereal bowl. a puppy, a tree, a bird, a bathtub, a garden, a flower, a dog house some cereal.
Ask the children to arrange the ten cards in the following way:
put the cereal in the garden
put the flower in the dog house
put the soap in the cereal bowl
put the puppy in the tree
put the bird in the bathtub.
Ask the children why they are laughing. Are things where they belong?
Then have them put them where they think they belong.
Activity 2: With your help, have the children discuss ways of how we know where things belong.
(Look for ideas on function, physical capabilities, like species, etc .)
Activity 3: Have the children draw a place that really suits them, where they are comfortable, where they feel “just right.”
Share their picture and their description of it with someone. Have a discussion about how we are all different about what suits us best. Also how we are alike.
Activity 4: Read Make Way for Ducklings together.
Activity 5: Ask the children to answer the following questions:
- What hazards did Mr. and Mrs. Mallard face?
- How did Mrs. Mallard know when she found “the right place?”
Find out what “molting” means.
Have the children write a thank you note to the policeman, Michael, for helping the family make their way through the traffic.
Activity 6: Ask the children to think of three things they could do to make their favorite place even better for them.
Activity 7: Have them enhance their favorite place and write about what they do.
Activity 8: Have them add an illustration to their writing. If you are working with more than one child, gather the work into a small book entitled Our Favorite Places. If working with one child, post that illustration and written description in an important place in the house. Be sure the child gets to tell others in the family about it.
This book is important in the way it helps children to understand how all living things need to be safe and feel they belong.
