We adore Eric Carle books in our house. One favorite that we have been loving for quite a few years now is From Head to Toe. There are a few things that I love about this
7 Authors To Read If You Love Liane Moriarty - Love Liane Moriarty + "Big Little Lies"? Here are 7 more authors with deliciously thrilling books to read!
These FREE Printables and Unit Studies for Eric Carle's Books will help you expand on what your kids are learning through these beloved books.
Haven't tried a book tasting with your students yet? This fun reading activity is an awesome way to introduce genres in your elementary classroom or library!
I love teaching students to make inferences in first grade. They feel like detectives as the search for what the author hasn’t said in the text. I thought I would take some time to share with you some of my favorite activities for teaching students how to infer. Using Photographs: When we begin making inferences, […]
I love teaching author's purpose...maybe it's the cozy PIE image it conjures up, or maybe it's the fact that for most kids, this is a concept that they "get" for the most part (with a little bit of explaining and some hands on practice). It's kind of the opposite of long division that way, if you know what I mean! Read more about Author's Purpose and how to teach it in this post by The Teacher Next Door.
Here you'll find some of our favorite children's books by 15 authors that we think everyone should know, love, and share. Click here to start reading!
14 Literary quotes about life 1. “If you want to know what a man’s like, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals.” 2. “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.” 3. “There is nothing like looking if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”
On the anniversary of her death, we reveal twenty things you might not know about doyenne of crime fiction, Agatha Christie
Your kids will love this Pete the Cat inspired activity! We have been reading many of the "Pete the Cat" books by Eric Litwin and the latest book we read was "Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes." ... In this book, Pete the Cat takes a walk
I have updated this link with a freebie! Click here to get there. "No, David" is one of our favorite books to begin the year or use anytime we need a little review of what our classroom expectations are. One corner of our classroom is devoted to David and our school rules. We read the book several times then the students chose one rule they thought was especially important to them and they typed their rule during Computer Lab time. Then each student created a picture of David and they turned out AMAZING! We had so much fun with David this year that we decided to use iMovie to create a short video of David following the rules and showed the video to the entire school. How FUN! If you would like to view the video you can see it on my classroom webpage. The poster shown above was printed at Staples. I used PhotoShop to edit the title to fit our lesson and class.
These FREE Printables and Unit Studies for Eric Carle's Books will help you expand on what your kids are learning through these beloved books.
Do you want to learn how to create adapted books for special education classrooms? This post provides a step by step list, with examples...
These all about me, back to school art activities for kids are engaging icebreakers. Encourage creativity and build community during the first week back
I found another amazing idea for my classroom on Pinterest. Apparently, I am unable to come up with my own original ideas. No biggie though…I love finding wonderful ideas from other teachers, and making them my own. Although I found this idea on Pinterest, it can be traced back to an old post from Growing…
I have an affinity for books. I’ve been reading more books a week than the average person for many years now. It’s what I do with most of my spare time. Everyone seems to know
Are you looking for classic Australian children's books to read with your child? Australia is still quite a young country in the big scheme of things, and so part of passing on the history of
Guest Post by Deborah J. Stewart, M. Ed. of Teach Preschool I have been following No Time for Flash Cards for a very long time now and one thing I know about Allie is that she loves a good quality children’s book. So I thought I would share a fun little book we recently explored […]
These FREE Printables and Unit Studies for Eric Carle's Books will help you expand on what your kids are learning through these beloved books.
We love connecting projects to books, and we're always inspired by the amazing group of bloggers who participate in the Virtual Book Club for Kids (you can also check the club out on Facebook) as the group comes up with some great extension activities each month. This month's author was Leo Lionni. We chose to read and do a project using a book we've really been enjoying lately, A Color of His Own. This is the sweet tale of a little chameleon who is looking for one color to stay all the time, but keeps running into that challenge that chameleons change color. In the end, he winds up finding a friend to always be with so they can at least always be the same color together. I've used this book in the past as a primary teacher. It's a great way to talk about friendship and also about what makes us each unique. My boys have been loving the simple tale and the colorful illustrations this spring. For our activity extension we decided to use cray-pas and watercolors. I love how colorful this art technique can be. I sketched several chameleon outlines onto white drawing paper using permanent marker. (I'm including a printable copy here in case you just want to print one out, or use the printable to trace onto thicker paper.) Afterwards the boys and I each colored in a chameleon using the cray-pas. Big Brother and I thought about ways to create different patterns. Little Brother focused on just coloring his in, using mostly one color. After we were done coloring, we watercolored on top of the cray-pas. The watercolor doesn't stick to the cray-pas, and fills all the white spaces around it. We all had different strategies for painting. When they were done I cut the three chameleons out and we hung them in our play room. I love how they are a set but each one unique. That's part of what can also make this project a great classroom activity, especially for the start of a school year. Or turn it into a fun family project, with each family member creating a chameleon to represent themselves. What Leo Lionni books does your family enjoy? Have you read this one yet? This post may also have been shared at some of these terrific link parties.
We’re knee deep now in our Tomie dePaola author study . Each time I read The Art Lesson I’m reminded and amazed all over again at the acute recollection Tomie dePaola has of his childhood. Down to the last detail. It’s those little details in the story and illustrations that draw me in and make The Art Lesson one of my […]
Has your child discovered the character Pigeon by Mo Willems yet? Try these fun and easy Pigeon and Bus Activities with your child today.
Our guest today is a 30 Days or Less alumna and the author of a charming children's book. As you can imagine, writing a book for children is no easy feat, especially for a first timer. Carrie agreed to tell us about the process that took her from a simple idea she had while working
Literature Circles in the elementary classroom. How to do literature circles with 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th grade students.
People are always asking me what my favorite books are, and for some reason I feel like answering that today. With certain exceptions, I dislike books where the author has ever posed with a cat. He who resembles Hannibal Lecter Lessing Ye Olde Windbag Thompson Cortazar Kerou-whack Twain Burroughs Anyway, I don’t usually ask about favorite books unless I’m curious about the individual. Or if someone recommends a book that I fall in love with, then I’ll ask them for recommendations later, but mostly to see if, by some miracle, our tastes match up on more than one title. Tastes are so subjective, it’s crazy to think that someone could like all the same favorite books as me – or even all the same books. And yet… Some books just appeal to a high percentage of everyone, even if a lot of them won’t admit it. (“Yes, I read the Da Vinci Code. SUCH bad writing. How on earth did he get published? I mean, the clichés! I almost couldn’t get through it. But it was interesting!”) Anyway, I’ve also had this discussion a lot lately – what makes a bestseller? I don’t mean paperbacks where the girl gets the dream guy and the CIA nabs another terrorist and two weeks later you can’t remember a single character. I mean books that get HUGE and turn into cultural icons, like Twilight and Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code and George RR Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire – or going further back: Clan of the Cave Bear and Lord of the Rings and the Wizard of Oz. Books that not only sell millions of copies but which also inspire a kind of dogged, even twisted loyalty. People read these books because they’re in vogue, but then they fall in love with them and talk about them for years. It seems like everybody and their mother loves them, has read them, is talking about them....you start to feel that they'll never go away. You know what I'm talking about. What makes that kind of book? Some random answers from various conversations: 1 - Most of those books are fantasy. They involve the creation of other worlds that readers enjoy inhabiting – worlds you wish were real and that you could be a part of. So it takes a fantasy novel to make people fall in love, kind of like it takes airbrushing to make a Victoria’s Secret model…. 2 - Corollary to the above: there’s something hardwired in the human brain that makes people appreciate fantasy. Witness the fact that every culture’s main artifacts are their myths, and we still listen to – and tell - and in some cases believe those stories today. 3 – Another corollary: Someone claimed that this was Tolkien’s answer, but whatever: that there’s something about the modern world that is essentially offensive to people’s souls. We live in the realm of the Lorax and we want grass and trees, so we look to novels or films to provide us with gratifying dramas set in magical landscapes with stories that involve the destruction of worlds and the desperate struggle to preserve those worlds. 4 – Each of these novels did something unique and fresh. (My personal argument here is that each of these novels did MANY things unique and fresh, as well as many things OLD AS HELL, but they did them with alchemical intelligence. And I'm not sure how much of that was even conscious. If you're following me this far, you'll understand when I say I want to write a book called "Breaking Dawn: or When the Author Accidentally Shows that They Had No Idea What They Were Actually Doing." And one for screenwriters called: "Lost.") 5 – Each of these writers was slightly mad and had a gripping, all-consuming passion for their art. And everybody knows that tortured artists are better. (When they're dead.) Which I think is not even remotely true. there has to be a key! 6 - Number one answer I hear from anyone in the publishing business: this kind of book is never made, there is just a magic conflux of events that blessed their literary souls: proper timing, cultural readiness, and good storytelling. And if anyone could please figure out the recipe for that magic conflux, please notify my publisher. 7 – Sheer dumb luck 8 – Voodoo 9 – A conspiracy of dumb readers, peasants with disposable income who could never be expected to appreciate the true genius of David Foster Wallace, David Mitchell or ye, any author named David (apologies to Sedaris). You know, those authors who say “screw you!” to basic ideas of, I don’t know, plot and character. If more readers appreciated this kind of butt-crack-of-the-bell-curve fiction then there wouldn’t be enough space left for books like Twilight to infect the planet. (I think, as punishment for their vanity, all the Butt-Cracks who make this argument should be forced to sign their favorite authors’ books at Walmart in hell for however long it took each dissatisfied reader to grapple their way through the tedious fiction.) 10 – I’m sure I left something out. I think the whole idea of a mystery series is that it's the long road to this phenomenon. For example: Lee Child, Sue Grafton, Janet Evanovitch. It’s like, if you write enough pages about this guy, or that girl, or this small town, then eventually you will have a full-scale fantasy novel on your hands – an utterly complete world that someone can slip into and stay in for years and know every nook and cranny of. One Lee Child book is fun, twenty is...hell, by then you’ve developed a frickin relationship with Reacher. You know how there are 5 or 6 flavor receptors on the tongue? Well, I feel like there 5 or 6 taste receptors in the storytelling brain, and apparently fantasy is a big one. Sometimes you taste the finest thing in the world, but if you have too much of it.... You people who are into zombie romance right now, you're like the Big Gulp gang of the literary world. You need to stop. Let’s say some of the above ten commandments are true. Then I want to know: What is it about people that makes them like fantasy so much? What is it about fantasy that appeals to people so much? What about all the great fantasy novels that DON'T get big? What are they failing to do, if anything? What sins have they committed? What vanities? What ignorance? Can someone answer that? Good lord, this is long. And where is sci-fi in all of this? Why, the movies and TV. Star Wars, Star Trek, Avatar, the Matrix. Anyway, I’ve been sneaky. I’ve just told some favorite books and movies, except my favoritest of all, the answer of which is embedded in here in the most un-subtle way, if you care to notice. (How much do you really want it??? Ahh see, you don’t. More proof of the Zen mantra that I just invented: asking questions is a cheap man’s way of finding answers. Next time someone asks me what my favorite book is, I’m going to say paper.) i said there were exceptions
How to write chapter outlines or chapter summaries for your memoir book proposal, including examples of how long they should be.
FUN! There are coloring pages and other activities to print out, digital posters and graphics, playlists, and more! Coloring Pages Download and print theses fun coloring pages from Todd’s boo…
If you're looking for what to read next, check out these authors like Colleen Hoover
Hi friends! I wanted to share a fun little activity we did this week to go along with one of everyone's favorite Back to School read alouds! I've mentioned before how much I LOVE directed drawings.
No David by David Shannon is a classic book to read in kindergarten. Here are free No David activities, videos and book ideas listed all in one place.
This guide gives you some tips on dropping hints of romance without explicitly stating it, or having your characters shout it from the rooftops.
