We did the big ook The Three Little Kittens by Paul Galdone this week in shared
reading.
Day 1: Build background by talking about the sounds cat make; notice the clothing on the cover; and then talk about the things we've lost and found and the feelings that provoked. Take a picture walk through the book, looking at the great illustrations to get clues
about how the characters felt. Read nonstop.Day 2: Make up motions for the parts of the story where the kittens lost, found, soiled, and washed their mittens. Notice the opposites in the story, and act out some opposites. Chime in reading.
Day 3: Look through the book for the favorite foods of cats (little mice, birds and fish are scattered throughout.) Echo read, then look for m and M in the lines of print.
Day 4: Define "characters" and ask the children to name the characters in the book. Choral read with some children doing the kittens' lines and some the mother cat's. After, have the children make stick puppet characters, with happy cat faces on one side and crying cat faces glued on the other. Use later for practice in story retelling.
Day 5: Get in groups of 4 and act it out, all together--I just went to a workshop
where having ALL the children act (even just one bit of the story) was emphasized very strongly, so we tried it (worked fine.) One child in each group is the mother cat, the rest are the kittens. Say the lines and act out the parts.
Put the book with three sets of old mittens, (check the lost and found at your school!)piepan, clothespins and line and some cat masks. I found the masks cheaply at the local dollar store around Halloween time.
The predictable chart for this week was: "The (animals) lost
their --------------. (Name)
Some contributions were very clever--the giraffes lost their spots, the
rhinos lost their horns. Anyway, we called it our silly story, and the kids
loved it!
