Armadillo’s Orange

If you use the Scott Foresman Reading Street Series, this book will probably be familiar to you!

It’s a cute story of a little armadillo who uses an orange to find his way back to his burrow.  When the orange rolls away, he doesn’t know how he will find his way back to his home.  What he never realized is that there were landmarks all around him to help him find his way home. 
I’m very particular about the Tier 2 vocabulary words I teach the children this year – my final research project for my master’s degree is about vocabulary acquisition, development, and teaching.  I love when I teach a word like landmark and the children continue to use the word!
We paid particular attention to the sequence of the story and made an adorable story map:

We read some other books that had armadillo’s in them as well and compared/contrasted the setting and characters in each story.

We read some non-fiction books about armadillo’s and made an armadillo tree map.

We also did a directed drawing of an armadillo using directions from Jan Brett’s website.
I think they turned out super cute!

I know we did some math problem solving with this unit too – but I forgot to take pictures! It’s been a few weeks since we did this book, so I forgot!  I’ll try to remember this week to snap some and add them to the post!

Don’t forget to check out the post below for all of the great organizational ideas from all of our bloggy friends! I’ll slowly make my way through them! Link up if you have a great idea!

Text-to-Self Connections

This week's focus book was Plaidypus Lost.   I have to admit, this book was not one of my favorites until the author, Susan Stevens Crummel, visited our school last year.  She made the book come alive when she read it to us and gave us the background behind it.
 

 

I used this book to teach text-to-self connections.  In the story, the little girl loses her beloved plaidypus that her grandmother made for her from her grandpa's old shirt.  However, the little girl was not responsible (a vocabulary word that we talked about with this book) and misplaced (another vocab word!) her friend in many different places.  Before we began reading the book, I asked the children to think of a time they lost something special to them; how did it make them feel?  Did they ever find it?  Did someone help them find it?  And so on...I wanted them to get a good mental image so they could good make strong text-to-self connections.

After we read the story and talked about our connections and wrote about them in our Reader's Workshop journal.  This page is from Kim Adsit's Reading comprehension pack at Teacher's Pay Teachers.

 

We also completed a story map together created from an example on Kim Adsit's site.

 We made a list of all the places they were in the story as well as all of the characters.  The children each signed up for one that they would like to draw and they created it for our flow map. (I'll post a picture of the sign-up chart later, I must have forgotten to snap one!)  Here are pictures of the flow chart that we created.  They children were very excited about how looonnnggg it was!  They did a wonderful job re-telling the story to help create the flow map.

We also read the book, A Platypus Probably and discussed the differences between fiction and non-fiction texts.  We talked about the most important things we learned about a platypus and labeled the parts of a platypus in our science journal. (I'll post a picture later, I forgot again!)