Reading Response Activities - Play With Me

This term with our co-op group we decided to break our kids up into two smaller groups, which has been much more effective to be able to give them more targeted age appropriate activities.

So whilst the older group are off working on Creative Writing, the younger group have been working on Reading Response Activities, using picture books.

As I normally run the Creative Writing Group I haven't had the opportunity until this past week to have some picture book fun with the younger kids. I love Picture books, they are such valuable learning tools, even for kids that may feel they are beyond them.

Given that this was the seventh week for them doing these activities, the book I chose was much to young but as I already had everything prepped we went along for the ride anyway.

This particular activity is given a one hour time slot, so whilst you could absolutely extend the learning, what I am sharing today is everything we did in that hour.

Play With Me is the gentle story of a little girl trying desperately to interact with the animals she encounters at the pond. Only realising that after she is quiet will the animals actually come out to play.

Whilst I read aloud, everyone water coloured a pond, some of them chose to add in drawings of the animals from the story. We housed all of the related items to this book in a file folder, so they glued their ponds to the front of that.

Each week they have been working on quickly and easily being able to summarise the story of the day. On week one they were introduced to this simple Summarising Sheet. They were able to easily identify each part of the story based on what they have learned using this sheet every week.

You can find a copy of the Summarising Sheet over at Nicole's TPT store in her Reading Notebooks. She has a reading notebook for several grades in her store. I'm unsure if the sheet above is in each of them though, you may have to ask Nicole that question.

After our summarising discussion we moved on to a Story Puzzle, the children are free to draw or write on these, whatever they choose. Basically another simple round table chat about the elements of the story. It is really nice to see them interacting and having the opportunity to bounce off each other, often this is one area in home education that can possibly be lacking.

This particular reading response sheet is from this big Reading Response Sheets pack on Teachers Pay Teachers.

Each week, each adult (we take turns with running the various groups) chooses their picture book and the activities to go along with it, apart from the summarising which is done each and every week.

This reading response pack covers all of the basic elements of dissecting a story.

Finally, we played a quick game of Who Am I? Because I knew this would be very simple for them I placed the focus on giving one person at a time the opportunity to speak.

These kids have been working closely together for some time now and so with familiarity the more confident children generally are holding the floor and doing most of the talking and answering of questions.

So we played a little game of, 'who has the ball'. Whoever I threw the ball to was the only person allowed to speak, therefore they had their chance to answer in any way they chose. They really liked this little game!

You can download a full pdf of prinable activities to go along with Play With Me  over at Homeschool Share.

The past seven weeks has been a nice gentle way to ensure each of the children understood many of the reading response concepts and a good refresh for others that had already been exposed to these terms.

Next term they are branching into a Literature study based on an abridged classic (not sure which one yet) and I know that this term has been a good introduction to that.

Happy Homeschool,
Kylie

Are you looking for other book unit ideas? Check out my Pinterest Board.

Follow Kylie @ Our Worldwide Classroom's board Book Units on Pinterest.

O is for Owl

We recently spent time learning and having loads of fun with Owls. The kids really got into this topic, considering that seeing an owl in the wild for us here is pretty rare, they were really very engaged.

We read the delightful story of Owl Moon on several occasions. Heading out into the moonlight on a snowy winters night is not something that my kids will get to experience any time soon, so this was quite a magical way for us to experience this through the story.

We completed some of the lapbooking activities found over at Homeschool Share. I hope to post on that one soon.

I found these super cute Paper Plate Owls online and knew we had to make some. They look great hanging from the ceiling and would have to be one of the simplest crafts we've done.

Owl Babies by Martin Wardell, this is a truly delightful story and whilst aimed at the younger crowd I'm fortunate enough to have an 11 year old that can still see the beauty in such a story.

This fabulous little guy is thanks to my delightful friend that played with us as we learned about owls. Once again a simple craft, found via google, but very effective. Although the help of a glue gun for this one is quite useful!

They each researched an owl of choice using the internet. Generally after a little looking around we tend to always come back to our favourite sites for animal research, Wikipedia and Animals A-Z.

I have been very pleasantly surprised as to the level of enthusiasm the kids have with these research documents. It's wonderful too watch.

We read Owls by Gail Gibbons. Yet another informative and interesting book by Gail. A couple of the pages focus mainly on American Owls, which is expected, but thought I should mention for any Australian readers. This book is full of facts and information presented with great illustrations.

Each of the kids water coloured an owl page and gave a brief narration on some of what they learned about owls. We still have some work to do on narrations, but they are improving and making progress in this area.

I purchased an Owl Puke kit for each of them to dissect. This was a little bit gross, but a whole lot of fun too! I would have to put it up there as something every child should do. The oohs and ahhs were running hot during the dissecting.

Whilst we have completed the dissection and found what creatures were devoured by our owls, I would love to reconstruct the skeletons. It's a big job as the pieces are so tiny and fine. Will see how we go.

Finally we rounded it all out with some art, as we always try to do with our units.

Fairy Princess 8 was very proud of this piece and so am I. Not necessarily for the finished product, but for her stamina and perseverance. She spent a great deal of time working on this, made a huge effort when it came to filling the entire page and finished with a smile. Often her art attempts end up in tears as what she has in her head isn't replicated on her paper. We've been spending a great deal of time talking about this and I think those discussions are starting to pay off.

Owls are such interesting creatures, we all learned so much from our time spent exploring them.

>>> Check out my Owl Themed Pinterest board for lots of ideas and links.

>>> Download the Animal Notebooking pages by clicking here.


This posted is linked at:

FIAR: Caps For sale

We've been rowing the delightful story of Caps For Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina, if you haven't read this to your kids, you really must!

We made fingerprint monkey's in a tree, the kids loved this and were very keen to add the finishing touches of leaves and grass.

You can't possibly read this story and not spend some time trying to balance caps on your head, lots of giggling happening here!!

A rhyming sheet from Homeschool Creations printable pack to go along with this story.

 

We measured stacks of caps, in centimetres though, not inches.

I googled some images of various monkey's from the around the world and we placed them on a world map, discussing what some of their habitats are like as we did this.

We completed mini books from Homeschool share and learned lots about monkeys. Where they fit in to the Animal Kingdom, their characteristics and the things they like to eat.

We've just started doing some research on a monkey of choice. Once completed these notebooking pages will go into our Animal Kingdom Notebooks. I'll share more about those soon.

Little Surfer Dude, thoroughly enjoyed recording his first narration.

My Pinterest Board for all things related to Caps For Sale

Before Five In A Row Link Up at Delightful Learning

Printables at Homeschool Share

Printables at Homeschool Creations

The Story About Ping


Aussie Book Adventures

Picture Book Fun: The Potato People

A while back during one of our book clubs with our home schooling friends, we read the story The Potato People by Pamela Allen.

This is a story about a little boy named Jack. He spends every friday with his Grandma and on this one particular day they make Potato People.

Their creations proceed to become the centre of the story.

Of course you simply cannot read the story of The Potato People without making a few of your own. So that is what we did.

Materials Need:

2 largish potatoes, cut the end off one so it will sit flat on the bench
jewellery wire (some thin and some slightly thicker)
beads, pony beads
feathers
foam shapes
pom poms
other adornments
toothpicks
pva glue or double sided tape

Will Come In Handy:

pencil
pliers
stapler

Choose your potatoes, one will be the head, the other will be the body. Cut the end off the body so that it sits flat on the bench. Join the head and body together with toothpicks, you will need anywhere between 2 and 4 depending on the size of your potatoes.

Use the thicker, stronger wire to make arms and legs. To avoid sharp ends roll a pony bead onto each end. Pliers come in handy here to roll the wire over.

Use the thinner wire, to make crazy potato people hair. Ours was mutli coloured so it worked superbly. Wrap the wire around a pencil to form a coil, slide it off the pencil and slightly stretch it. Poke one end of the wire into the head of your potato person. Keep adding hair until you are satisfied.

Now it's time to make a face, we placed all of our adornments on a table and just left the kids pick and choose what they wanted to use. Some needed adult assistance. A stapler (or at least some unused staples) comes in handy to push in things like pom poms and foam shapes.

You can even add clothing, out of feathers, materials or whatever you have laying around really.

Our potato people sat around watching us until they went mouldy and we had to bid them farewell. I can't wait to do this again when C is a little older.

I am linking this to stART - A Story + Art = stART

Vote for us. One click is all you need!

Literature Unit: Story About Ping

We recently 'rowed' The Story About ping and I am only now getting around to posting about it. If you are unfamiliar with the term 'row, rowed, rowing' it was coined by FIAR and the fact that they advocate to read the same book (the book you are studying) for five days in a row......make sense?!

I have purchased the first Volume of FIAR after having completed a few of the BFIAR books with the kids over the last few years. This is a supplement, something different, not something we would do all of the time. Not because I don't feel that it isn't 'good enoough' or up to par, in fact it is a beautiful, gentle, encouraging way to learn and perfect to use in a way which brings all of the children together.

I just don't want FIAR to become same old same old, if we were to tackle it week in week out. In the end there is loads of printing and loads of cutting of mini books and whilst doing the odd lapbooking type project here and there for the kids is fun, I really don't want it to be our basis. In fact I like to change things up all the time and use a wide variety of stuff.

We are certainly not a family to purchase a curriculum and use it from Pre - 12 and I don't think we will ever do that! In saying all of that though, this was truly enjoyable and I am looking forward to rowing something again soon.

The kids had a blast and asked for the related activities several times over the span of the two weeks that we took to complete this project.

I also chose to change things and not do a traditional lapbook, we already have done a few and the thought of having to store all of those lapbooks that could possibly build up over the years was a growing nightmare. So we have done what I think is now being called a Lap n Note, a combination of a lapbooking and notebooking.

We've still used all of the little booklets, with each on a sheet of A4 cardstock, my plan is at some stage to bind these all together into one large Literature Studies Booklet. I'm still not sure if I have made the right decision on how we have put these together but my procrastination on the assembly side of things already held us up for weeks.

First it was trying to decide if we should stop doing them in the manila folders, then I had to come up with alternatives, large scrapbook/A3 sketch books were a possibility too. I think any way would work but my thoughts on the lap n note is that we can easily 'rerow' books (since K has only just turned 6 this is a high possibility) and add to our exisiting lap n notes (much more difficult to do with an already completed lapbook)

So as you look at the images you will notice that there are some blank pages (this is where I am unsure if I have made the right choices here). Anyway, I'll quit rambling so you can just scroll and look at some of the photo's.

All printables are straight from the lovely ladies at home school share and I am only showing B's as K's is very similar anyway.

I have grouped like topics/subjects together, so geography/cultural topics on china.

I always take lots of photo's so made sure that those were included. These are invaluable when tyring to show/remember hands on stuff, like the salt dough map of china and the other smaller creations (ping and a chinese flag)

Moving on to language arts, which includes poetry above and story sequencing below.

Well that's a boring photo, I probably should have opened the booklet. It is filled with small images of the story that the children had to sequence before gluing into the mini booklet. Need some more language arts activities to complete this page.

Counting Ping's family.

Extra's, like the cute carrot and celery stick Ping, B made from his snack and K loved the egg Ping toasties.

And not forgetting a bit of science, the sun mini booklet was actually from 1+1+1=1.

This is the finish and we have one lonely mini book on types of ducks, Which in one way is great as it shows exactly what we need to focus on the next time we row Ping, but what if we never get back to it, this is going to be one big glaringly boring page!

Oh well maybe we can fill it with some cute duck pictures or something.