Strategic Literacy, Week 2

(Y) While reading to my kindergarten class the book, The Biggest, Best Snowman” by Margery Cuyler, beautifully illustrated by Will Hillenbrand, we reviewed some vocabulary. One of the words was blustery. I talked to them about the blustery wind that was blowing outside today. I encouraged them to try to use this word in a sentence sometime this week. After giving them the title of the book and, before showing them any of the illustrations, we talked about what season the book would be describing. I showed them a few of the beautiful snowy illustrations to let them know their prediction was correct. I pointed out the phrase “bare-branched trees” and we discussed why the trees would be bare.

I showed the students some illustrations of Little Nell with the forest animals (a bear, rabbit, reindeer, cardinal, crow and sparrow). The animals were talking to Little Nell and helping her build a huge snowman. I asked if they thought the story was real or make-belief and why they thought this. This open-ended question elicited several comments from the class about animals not being able to talk to people or to build a snowman.

I conducted a sustained conversation with the class on why it would not be a good idea to play with a bear cub and what might happen. It was brought out that the Mama Bear would probably be close by and would likely attack anyone approaching her baby.

To build comprehension by building a bridge to their own experience, we talked about times when people in their family, or others, might have told them that they were “too little” to do certain things. I asked them how this made them feel.

By asking these types of questions, I was able to elicit more than just single word responses. This caused students to have to think about the answers, make predictions and draw conclusions. These higher-order thinking activities are likely to give more meaning to the story.