Finishing Up Wordless Books

We've been studying wordless picture books for the last month or so in kindergarten through 2nd grade. The kids absolutely love having to "read" the pictures and figure out what is happening in the story. This week, we will vote for which book was our favorite.

We've read some great books including:

Flotsam, by David Weisner
Owly & Wormy, by Andy Runton
One Scary Night, by Antoine Guilloppe
Chalk, by Bill Thomson
A Ball for Daisy, by Chris Rashka
The Lion & the Mouse, by Jerry Pinkney
Where's Walrus?, by Stephen Savage
Chicken and Cat Clean Up, by Sara Varon
Bow-Wow Bugs a Bug, by Mark Newgarden
Beaver is Lost, by Elisha Cooper
The Last Laugh, by Arianne Dewey



Here is our first grade telling of Owly & Wormy: Friends All Aflutter using Voicethread:




To close out in 2nd grade, we read some Owly & Wormy shorts and wrote what was happening beneath. We hung those as a display in the hallway. Then the kids looked at some Garfield comics, and some from Bubba World. Their "reading" isn't perfectly accurate, but some of them are just super cute and some use their most expressive voices and crack me up. Here are some 2nd graders "reading" their comic strips:

Lit Circle Roles Posters

These are the posters I created for each role in our 4th grade lit circles. I don't have one for Summarizer done yet, but we've practiced that a lot, and kids generally know what to do. We are using Edmodo to communicate between sections, so that's why everything is posted into Edmodo. We just finished discussing all of the jobs, but we're off to a good start.

Here are some screenshots from the Edmodo groups:

Holiday Spirit!

A delivery of new books!

I'm not sure what happened, but my desk ended up covered in sticky notes!

Our cute little book tree, thanks to Pinterest & Mrs. Yoder!

One & Only Ivan

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is easily one of my favorite books ever.

Based on the true story of a gorilla named Ivan, this book will make you cry, laugh and really think. All the things a good book does.

What I love most about this book is the depth of the characters. Ivan, Ruby, Stella, Bob, Julia & Mack all have their stories woven into it, bound together in their relationships with each other. The depth of these relationships is what makes the book so beautiful and so heart-breaking at times.

This is a book that I could read over and over. I read it aloud to two 5th grade sections this Fall, after reading it myself last Spring. I still cried both times I read it, and both classes cheered at the end, but were very sad that it was over.

What a perfect book.



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