read aloud plan #2

Mora, Pat. Yum! MmMm! Que' rico!. Illus. Rafael Lopez. New York, NY: Lee & Low Books Inc., 2007.


For my second read aloud plan I will read the book Yum! MmMm! Que' Rico! by Pat Mora. I will read this book to a small group of pre-Kindergarten students. I will only read the poems to the students. This book is an appropriate length and uses language that is appropriate to the age group. The children will enjoy the pictures as well. I expect the children will comment on the illustrations and colors in the book. I also expect them to comment on the foods that are represented in the poems. I am hoping that my Spanish speaking students will recognize and comment on the Spanish words used in a few of the poems and the title. I expect that they will be proud of themselves for recognizing words that some of the other students may not know.

Read aloud Journal:

Unexpectedly, none of my Spanish speaking children commented on the Spanish words in the text. The children did however comment on the different foods. They said things like "chiles are hot", " I like ice cream", "Tomatoes are yucky, I never eat tomatoes". What the responded to the most were the illustrations in the book. Many of the children wanted to look at the picture for a little longer. I would read a poem, and then turn the page. They would say, "go back I want to look." After reading the book they wanted to hold it and look back through the illustrations. One girl loved to look at the chile page. She wanted to keep going back to it. They seemed to be bored by the text. They would talk out, or interrupt while I read the poem. Usually their interruptions had something to do with the illustrations.

Children's Literature, Breifly ch. 11

Tunnell, Michael O. and James S. Jacobs. Children's Literature, Briefly. 4e. Upper Sadle River NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall, 2008.

Sorry I have to be honest, this chapter completely bored me. I liked the Somerset Maugham quote, it was funny. I read one of his books, "The Razors Edge". I liked it too. I can't think of any thing else to write about this chapter. Will this be chapter be addressed in our exam?

Children's Literature, Briefly ch. 12

Tunnell, Michael O. and James S. Jacobs. Children's Literature, Briefly. 4e. Upper Sadle River NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall, 2008.

Learning history through historical fiction books instead of text books is a wonderful idea. I remember how boring my history text books were in school. When presented with just facts, history can seem flat and lifeless. If I could have seen how different events or conditions effected a character that I may have identified with I would have remembered a lot more. It might have brought history to life and made it seem more "real" to me. Which is kind of funny because the strait facts are more real that the fiction mixed with the facts

Read aloud plan #1 and read aloud journal #1

Suess, Dr. My Many Colored Days. Illus. Steve Johnson & Lou Fancher. New York, NY: Random House Inc., 1996.

The book I chose for my first read aloud was My Many Colored days by Dr. Suess. I plan to read this book to a small group of five year old children. I chose this book because I think the children will enjoy the pictures and they can understand, and possibly relate to the story. The text is short, and filled with emotion. It will hold their attention. I am hoping the children will recognize and comment on the colors in the pictures. I also will ask them what color day they are having. I want them to relate a color in the story with the emotion, or make up their own color and pair it with any emotion they choose.

Read aloud Journal

As I expected the children really liked this book. They loved the pictures. Manny of the children had a favorite picture. After I was done reading the kids started talking about what picture they liked best. They would say things like " I liked the dinosaur," or "can I see the green fish again". The pink flamingos was one little girls favorite picture. Some of the children paired the color with the animal, some of them just talked about the animal and did not refer to the color. No one referred to the emotion. When I asked them how they felt, and what color they felt like today they had all sorts of different answers. One girl said she was red. When I asked her why, she said because she wanted to be a horse. One boy was blue because that was his favorite color. One girl was pink. She said it was her favorite color and she felt happy. I would like to read this book more often to the children and see if they get better at identifying emotions in the book as well as the emotions they are feeling at the time.

Que rico!

Mora, Pat. Yum! MmMm! Que' rico!. Illus. Rafael Lopez. New York, NY: Lee & Low Books Inc., 2007.

This book is a collection of haiku poems about foods that are native to the Americas. There is also a paragraph of facts for each food. The paragraph contains information about the foods history, origins, uses and other fun facts. The poems are fun and filled with imagery. The pictures are wonderful and filled with vibrant colors. My favorite poem was about the chile. What I like most is that any age group can enjoy this book. The younger kids will enjoy the poems and pictures. Older kids can will find the facts to be interesting. The tomatoes is which is often associated with Italian food is actually native to the Americas. I like how the facts relate to children and their interests. Potatoes are grown in outer space and corn kernels are use to make crayons. This would be a good read aloud book for a group of children whose ages vary.

children's literature autobiography

I don't really remember much about reading as a child. In fact I don't remember much of anything about my early childhood. I only have a few bits and pieces that come to mind. My mom told me that my brother an I read all the time, and that she read to us. I do remember my favorite book was Harry and the Terrible Whatsit. The book was about a kid, and a monster who terrorized him. The monster got bigger with the child's fear. Once the child decided he wasn't going to be afraid of the monster, the monster started shrinking. The kid was hitting the monster with a broom and it kept shrinking. Eventually the tiny monster ended up crying on the washing machine. At least that is how I think the story went. I also remember my mom taking us to the city library. I think we had a chart with however many books we read indicated on it. Of all the title on my chart, I really liked this book of scary ghost stories best. The pictures in the book were all black and white. I liked to read, but I liked the duck pond at the library better.When I was in the third grade my parents had me tested for learning disabilities. At the time I didn't realize that I was being tested. I went to some strange office building where I had a piece of candy, got a drink from the water fountain, and did some puzzles. That is all I remember of that experience. Later when I was eighteen years old I overheard my mom tell someone that they had had me tested and that I was mildly dyslexic. Only then did I realize what that strange day had been all about. I asked my mom about it later and she told me that I was in fact dyslexic. They never told me about it before because it was not serious and they did not want me to make excuses for not performing properly in school. I have heard that people with dyslexia have a hard time reading, but I never noticed it when I was reading to myself. However, I hated to read aloud in class. I was a slow reader and occasionally stumbled over the words. Sometimes I read aloud a word that looked similar to the word I was reading, but meant something totally different. It was quite embarrassing. I had no comprehension when I read aloud because I was to busy concentrating on reading the individual words as fast as I possibly could. It all seemed fairly normal to me. Sometimes I think I should have myself tested again. Just so I know. If anything, I think I might have ADD. I can read a whole page sometimes and not know anything about what I just read.In my later elementary and early junior high years I read some of the series books. I remember reading Sweet Valley High and Baby Sitters Club, or something like that. I do not remember being excited about new books. I liked the book Bunicula. It was about a vampire rabbit that sucked vegetables dry untill they were white. The dog was the narrator of the story, and the cat was very suspicious of the rabbit. It was a mystery. The only book I remember reading for school was Where the Red Fern Grows. It made me cry, and I hated the book. I used to go to my mom's first grade classroom when school was out. I would pass the time by lying on the floor and reading all her classroom books. I read Bearenstine Bears and other books like that. I did not necessarily enjoy it. It was just something to do.When I got into high school we started reading more in my English and literature classes. I never read outside of school required reading. I hated Shakespeare. I never understood the imagery or hidden meanings of the books we read. What the book said and what it meant were two different things. It deeply frustrated me. I never liked Dickens or Hemingway either. The language sometimes made these books difficult to read. People today do not talk in the language the books were written in. Especially in the case of Shakespeare. I never read much of the books anyways. I read bits and pieces of the books, listened to the class discussions and the teacher's interpretations of the books. I would use that information for any of the tests we had in class. If I had to write a book report I tried to find the movie, and based my report on that. My English grades weren't great, but they were ok. Mostly B's and the occasional C. One night late in my senior year of high school I picked up my mom's book and started to read it. It was a John Grisham book, The Firm I think. I read it within a few nights. It was easy to read, entertaining and, best of all, I was sure there was no hidden meaning I was supposed to decipher in order to comprehend the story. It was at that point I realized that one could possibly read for the purpose of enjoyment.After I graduated high school I started to read a little more. I read mostly books my parents or brother gave to me. At some point I decided to read some of the classics that I avoided in high school. Dickens wasn't so bad when I took the time to read it. I still didn't touch Shakespeare. Some of Mark Twain's stories made me laugh. I realized I liked books with humor. I once asked my friend if he could recommend a good book for me to read. He suggested A Confederacy of Dunces. It was hilarious. Now it is one of my most recommended books. Books with plenty of comic relief tend to be my favorites. Now I read a little every night before I go to bed. I tend to alternate "good" books with less quality novels. I still like to read novels with low literary qualities and predictable endings. I consider them my television books. I read them for the same reasons people might watch a sitcom on TV. It is thoughtless entertainment. Sometimes it feels good to lay in my bed and read without having to think about anything at all.I have two children. They are five and two years old. Everyday I read to them. They have a book shelf in thier room that is full of books. If I see a book that I liked when I was a child, I get it for them. Their grandparents, aunts and uncles send them books all the time. We have a whole shelf dedicated to Dr. Seuss. They seem to have a favorite book for a month at a time, and then they move on to something else. The books I enjoy the least are the ones based on television cartoons or movies.However,if they bring them to me then I read them. I even try to make the voices of the cartoon characters as I read them. It isn't easy, but they laugh. Sometimes we will read book after book. I always start by asking them to bring me one book each, but somehow I end up reading six books instead of two. Sometimes they want me to read the same book five times in a row. They keep asking me to read it again and again. I never remember doing that as a child, but I hope their reading with me is an enjoyable experience that they will remember when they get older.

HELP!

Can anyone tell me where to find the Que Rico book by Pat Mora. I am having trouble finding it.

Craft lesson #4

This lesson will deal with color recognition, fine motor coordination, and recognizing emotions.

First I will read the book My many colored days, then we will make masks for this lesson. I will have different colored paper plates and tongue depressors for them to hold the plates up to their face. Then I would ask each child to name the color of the plate they chose to work with. I would help them cut eye holes in the plate if they needed help. Then I would have different colored feathers, crayons and shapes the can glue onto the plate. I would go around asking the children what different colors they have put on their masks. I would also ask them what emotion the mask portrayed. Is it a happy, sad or angry mask? I will make a angry mask of my own and show them how I can put on my angry mask, and then take it off and go back to being myself. I would talk to them about how it is ok to feel sad, mad, excited or tired. These emotions will not last forever and eventually we will go back to feeling like ourselves again.

"My Many Colored Days"

Suess, Dr. My Many Colored Days. Illus. Steve Johnson & Lou Fancher. New York, NY: Random House Inc., 1996.

This book was good. It was about a kids different days and different colors he feels on those days. I liked how he compared himself to different animals. He a slow brown bear, and a yellow busy bee. I think the combination of the animals with the colored days helps children understand the emotion better. I love the paintings in this book. My two favorite one were the loud, mad black days, and the pink happy days. I like that it teaches kids that it is ok to feel different ways. It is ok to be mad or sad. At the end of the book it has a mixed up day where the kid does not know how he is feeling, and that is ok too. Even though the child feels all these emotions at the end of the book he goes back to feeling like himself.

Chidren's Literature, Breifly ch.10

Tunnell, Michael O. and James S. Jacobs. Children's Literature, Briefly. 4e. Upper Sadle River NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall, 2008.

I liked this chapter, it was short. Just kidding. Well sort of just kidding. I never thought of fantasy or science fiction as being hard to write. The book talked about how the authors had to come up with a new set of laws and conform to them. It brought to mind the sci-fi conventions that take place. It reminded me of "Trekkies"(is that how you spell it?). I have heard that people learn a new language based on the shows or books. It's crazy. How long would it take for a person to think up these things. The creativity involved is amazing. I liked how the book pointed out that even though a book is fantasy, to be good it has to have real truths about human nature and life in general.

Chidren's

oops

Children's Literature, Breifly ch.18

Tunnell, Michael O. and James S. Jacobs. Children's Literature, Briefly. 4e. Upper Sadle River NJ: Pearson/Merrill Prentice Hall, 2008.

I think using trade books instead of text books in the classroom is a great idea. If you can get the information across using a trade book rather than a text book then I think you should do it. Personally I would much rather read a trade book than a boring flat text book. You could assign a trade book to a class and through their reading they could be absorbing all sorts of information without even knowing it. There are times when textbooks are necessary, especially in science and math classes that deal with formulas. However, I think children are more likely to read the trade books than text books.

craft lesson #3

Discussion:

In the book "Minn and Jake " Jake compares his classmates to different animals. One boy was tiger, one was a snake, another was a housefly. Minn was a giant squid. This lesson will be an exercise in writing skills and will be aimed at fourth grade students. I would allow the students to be creative with this assignment.

Activity:
Write about what kind of animal you might be in a different life. Explain why you would be the type of animal you have chosen. It can be in style of writing you choose. You can choose any animal for any reason. You may choose to focus on the appearance of an animal, the behaviors of the animal, or even the animals environment.

Minn and Jake

Wong, Janet S. Minn and Jake. Illus. Genevieve Cote. New York, NY: Frances Foster Books, 2003.

I really liked this book. I thought Janet Wong did an excellent job of capturing the elementary feeling. The characters dealt with problems that all elementary kids deal with. Minn felt akward and self-conscious about her height. I think all girls off this age feel that there is somthing about there bodies that is akward or they would like to change. Also Minn was wanting to find a freind and learning what it is to be a friend. Friendship at this age is really important and children crave for a sense of belonging. I also liked the little things that the the different characters did that took me back to how I felt at this age. I liked when Minn talked about a certain girl that began with the letter S and ended in the letter a. I said things like that when I was in elementary school.