Our Kindergarten students have been learning about rhyming words. For our library lesson, we read two different stories.
For our first story, we read Cats’ Night Out by Caroline Stutson. Students gave me a thumbs up when they heard rhyming words. Sometimes we paused and they told a partner the rhyming words they heard. Other times we shared them aloud to the whole group. We also took time to notice that there was a counting pattern in this book, counting by twos.
For our second story, we read Say What? by Angela DiTerlizzi. This book explores the sounds that animals make and thinks about what animals might really be saying when they make their sounds. This book sets up a great pattern that students can model in their own writing.
For our work time, I put together a Storybird to use with all of the classes that participated in this lesson. I searched for animal pictures within Storybird and pulled a few onto each page of the book. Then, I typed the sentence starters for each animal. “When a _______________ says _______________ does she really mean _________________________?” Each class brainstormed rhyming word pairs for each animal picture. It was about 2-3 pictures per class. After the final class, we had written a collaborative ebook. I emailed the link to all of the teachers so that students could see how the book turned out.
This lesson also served another purpose. It was an authentic way to show a web tool that students would be using in the future. Rather than teach about making a Storybird, students saw a Storybird in action. Now, when we actually look at some of the steps, they’ll have a concrete example of a finished product to reference. This was the first time that I have tried this, and I’m curious to see how it will impact future Storybird projects.
Expect the Miraculous 