With cool cut-outs on the pages, One Boy by Laura Vaccaro Seeger shows how one word can be found within another word. This counting book starts with the words “One boy” (who we see through a cut-out square on the next page.) Turn the page, and the square hole is now aligned over the word “one” to show that it’s part of the word “alone”. I made index cards of each word in the word pairs where one word shows through to be part of the other word (room and brooms, etc.) After reading One Boy to kindergartners, I gave each student a card with a word and asked them to find their “word building buddy”. Even students who were still working on letter identification could hold a card next to another to see how the letter shapes matched up. Once students had found their word building buddy, we displayed the cards next to each other and asked for a class vote of thumbs up or down on whether or not a match had been made. A counting book that also helps teach print awareness? One Boy is one good book!
Guess Who Is Out of the Den?
