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Valentine's Day is fast approaching! So sorry if I was the first one to tell you that, but it's true! So The Reading Crew got together again and decided to share that lovey-dovey stuff with our followers. Each specialist has picked a book that is either their one of their favorites, or may be a wonderful timely book for this time of year. In addition, they are sharing with you, our readers, some
I have always been a reader. I frequently tell the students I see, "So many books, so little time." I have favorite authors, books, genres, and I always know what I am going to read next after I have finished a book. Funny thing about me: I can stay up until 2:00 in the morning reading a book, once a finish it, I have to read at least 10 pages into another book before I can go to sleep. I think it is because I must always be reading something. Heaven forbid, I be between books! GASP!
I love making lists of my favorite authors and what books they have written. I have a notebook that I keep all of that in. I would take a picture of it, but I am afraid you would lose respect and think I was too geeky to continue following my blog. I love buying books. I love going to the library and checking out books (I absolutely love the smell that ALL library books seem to have)! However, I am not a very fast reader. And especially when it comes to non-fiction, I really have to slow down. My friends seem to breeze through books at a rate that leaves me breathless. I continue to plod along at my slow pace. I don't have a slow reading rate or anything, I just take a long time digesting what I read.
Enter student teaching. I loved all the prep classes in reading in my undergrad from good ole' Western Illinois University (when I went every elementary education major graduated with 18 hours of reading), but the idea of teaching reading scared the bologna out of me. I am a math-minded person. There is right, there is wrong, show your work. That's easy! Reading is so loosey-goosey, too much gray area, yuck! Someone up there (thank you) heard my cries and felt my trepidation, because they gave me about the best cooperating teacher for reading (and pretty much every thing else) a beginning teacher could have. It was clear that teaching reading was her passion, and the students quickly saw that and became passionate about reading too. She was getting her Reading Specialist degree at the time I student taught. I remember thinking, "I could never do that, or even want to do that." I got a job teaching third grade the very next year, and two years after that, I went back to school for my Reading Specialist certificate.
I've always had a love for literacy and reading, but I feel like my student teaching experience gave me the love for teaching literacy!
I love making lists of my favorite authors and what books they have written. I have a notebook that I keep all of that in. I would take a picture of it, but I am afraid you would lose respect and think I was too geeky to continue following my blog. I love buying books. I love going to the library and checking out books (I absolutely love the smell that ALL library books seem to have)! However, I am not a very fast reader. And especially when it comes to non-fiction, I really have to slow down. My friends seem to breeze through books at a rate that leaves me breathless. I continue to plod along at my slow pace. I don't have a slow reading rate or anything, I just take a long time digesting what I read.
Enter student teaching. I loved all the prep classes in reading in my undergrad from good ole' Western Illinois University (when I went every elementary education major graduated with 18 hours of reading), but the idea of teaching reading scared the bologna out of me. I am a math-minded person. There is right, there is wrong, show your work. That's easy! Reading is so loosey-goosey, too much gray area, yuck! Someone up there (thank you) heard my cries and felt my trepidation, because they gave me about the best cooperating teacher for reading (and pretty much every thing else) a beginning teacher could have. It was clear that teaching reading was her passion, and the students quickly saw that and became passionate about reading too. She was getting her Reading Specialist degree at the time I student taught. I remember thinking, "I could never do that, or even want to do that." I got a job teaching third grade the very next year, and two years after that, I went back to school for my Reading Specialist certificate.
I've always had a love for literacy and reading, but I feel like my student teaching experience gave me the love for teaching literacy!
Enough about me, onto the book I chose. I grabbed this book off of the rack at a Scholastic Book Fair sale the one year I was a school librarian. I picked it up for our school, but I stashed one away to buy for my oldest daughter.
It's a cute story about a young child going to bed, and the monster that is usually under their bed went fishing for the night. The child realizes that they can't fall asleep without the monster, so other monsters try to substitute for missing monster. It was wonderful illustrations with a vocabulary that would be best for a read aloud from grades 2-5.
The book is fantastic for teaching the reading strategy of visualizing. Normally, I show the pictures to the students as I read to them. For this book, I do not. I purposely wait until we have talked about the monsters and what we think they should look like, and what clues the author put there to help us with those mental pictures.
The lesson starts with a 2 page Interactive Read Aloud Lesson Plan. The lesson plan tells you where to stop in the story and what to talk about with the students.
The next part of the product has the students creating their own monster. Then they have to write a piece about their monster describing what it looks like. When the students are done, it is so fun trying to match up each writing piece to the correct monster. You can even make it a game. Some students are very straight-forward in their writing. They describe the physical traits of their monster. Some try to make their piece a little trickier by not stating outright, but using clues that the reader must figure out. All in all, when the students are done, they have had a monstrous good time (pun intended)!
I hope you enjoy the freebie and leave feedback, especially after you have tried it with your students. You can also spread the love by following me on Bloglovin'. Thanks so much for stopping by!
This item was free only for the Loving Literacy Blog Hop Weekend. It is now a paid item in my store. Thanks again for stopping by!
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I love this book! We used it earlier this year and a whole class read aloud doing the exact same thing. It was great! Seriously, this was great and seeing the kids come up with their own ideas based on visualizing was really cool.
ReplyDeleteThanks Amy!
matt
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