The Snowy Day

Yeah, I know I live in Florida and we don't get snow days, but we do read some snow and winter themed books.  Some of my kiddos have never even seen snow!  That is so strange to me (who grew up in Ohio).  This year, the kids came back on Wednesday, so we couldn't really launch into a new unit or story with only 3 days.  So, instead, we spent these  3 days reading these:

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We used The Snowy Day to work on sequencing and retelling a story.  We used the picture cards found here.

The book Snow Day is really simple, but it has a fun twist.  See, the crocodiles (or maybe they're alligators...who knows?) wake up to snow and go out to play.  All of a sudden, they stop and realize it's a school day.  Only then do we find out that they are not kids, but the principals of the schools!  They go in and call the news to cancel school so they can go back outside and continue to play.  We used this book to practice predicting (and for recognizing that it's okay if our predictions are a little off). 

We also needed to review some skills from before Christmas, but I also wanted to incorporate this practice into the stories we were reading.  So, I went through The Snowy Day and wrote out some of the sentences on chart paper like this:

You'll notice that I took out some of the words and left blanks.  We were working on inflectional endings -ed and -ing.  Then, the students had to tell me, using the base word below the blank, what ending we shouuld add to the word so that it makes sense in the sentence.  I gave them a post it and let them stick it on the chart.  When we were done, it looked like this:

I was going to type this activity up as a worksheet to share with you guys, but I'm not sure about copyright.  Am I allowed to?  Anybody know the rules?

 

Next week, we're headed into outer space!  My door is ready to welcome the kiddos:

 

My son wanted to get in the picture, so I promised him I would post this one too:

 

I'm off now to blast into dreamland.  Even though the kiddos were only thee 3 days this week, I'm WIPED OUT!!!  In fact, I typed most of this post with my eyes shut.  So if you find any mistakes or typos, you'll just have to catch me tomorrow!

Nighty Night!