Category Archives: Readers’ Theater

Go Bananas Over This Easiest Easy-Read

Happy April, everyone! A teacher-friend asked me for super-simple books for readers who are wrestling with her lowest-leveled texts. I shared BANANA! by Ed Vere and the kids went ape. The facial expressions on the two monkeys are so engaging, and the text is limited to two words: “banana” and “please” with either question marks or exclamation points. As I read, I pointed out how the exclamation mark and question mark change the way we read the words. (Print Concepts mini-lesson? Check!)

Banana! is perfect for readers’ theater. After reading the book to your students, split them into pairs. The kids can make their own monkey masks or hats or puppets. Give students time to practice their lines (nailing that Common Core State Standard of Fluency). Then, kids take turns performing for the class, reading their lines as you hold up the book and turn the pages.

You can make a silly spin-off book called “Apple!” Take photos of two teachers arguing over who gets to eat the apple and lay them out like Ed Vere’s pages. You can make lots of little class books like this if you have a digital camera – let your students be the stars of the book, arguing over and eventually sharing an orange, or a pencil, etc. Your students will go, well, bananas for this book!

I’ll be in Elizabeth, New Jersey this month to talk about the best books to teach preschool and kindergarden reading standards. Next month, I’m the keynote speaker for an early literacy conference in Michigan and I have two presentations to public librarians on Common Core State Standards. Please keep your fingers crossed for ice-storm-free travel days!

Banana!

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Want a book that every kid in your class can read with expression and enjoyment? Try Ed Vere’s nearly wordless picture book, Banana! I love using wordless and nearly wordless books with young readers. (If you want the myriad of reasons why wordless books are great for building narrative skills, fluency, top-down processing, etc., check out this article by the Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement or this one from Education Week.) The facial expressions on the two monkeys are so engaging, and the text is limited to two words: banana and please with either question marks or exclamation points. As you read, point out how the exclamation mark and question mark change the way we read the words. (Print Concepts mini-lesson? Check!)

Banana! is perfect for young readers’ theater. After reading the book to your students, split them into pairs. The kids can make their own monkey masks or hats or puppets. Give students time to practice their lines (nailing that Common Core State Standard of Fluency). Then, kids take turns performing for the class, reading their lines as you hold up the book and turn the pages.

Doggone Feet is Doggone Fun!

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There are many perks to being a children’s librarian (no overdue fines has saved me a bundle over the years) but one of the best parts of my job is getting to know supah-cool authors and illustrators like Leslie Helakoski. Leslie is a Michigan treasure I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for years, and I’m geeked to share her brand new book with you: Doggone Feet.

Dog follows a pair of feet home from the park one day and finds her perfect place under the table. Life is good until two more feet come on the scene:
“They’re twirling leg twisters, toe-tapping kiss-kissers,
rule-listing insisters of doggy shampoos.”
So now the space under the table includes the dog and two sets of two feet, until another pair come along – tiny baby feet. As the family grows the dog must accommodate more pairs of feet in her shrinking space, and she’s not sure she likes the new additions. In the end, though the space under the table is crowded and cramped, the message is clear: families always make room for more.

The first time I read this book, I immediately thought how it perfect it would be for a math lesson. If there were two dogs and three humans, how many feet would be under the table? It’s also a great book to talk about point of view – both figuratively and literally. The story is told from the dog’s perspective, and we don’t see the faces of the humans, just their feet, until the end of the book. You can talk with your students about author/illustrator’s Craft and Structure – why did Ms. Helakoski choose to frame all the illustrations from this different point of view? How might a mouse see life under a dinner table, or a fly over a school cafeteria table at lunchtime? It’d be fun to have students spend a writing session on the floor under their desks, to inspire them to write and draw from a different point of view.

Then I saw the terrific trailer that Leslie’s son, Connor, made for her book:

How cool would it be to combine book-trailer technology with a math lesson centered around Doggone Feet?! Using a free app like Educreations on the iPad or a program like iMovie on computers, students could make a mini-movie to retell the events of the story (check off Key Ideas and Details on your Common Core State Standards score card) either by drawing the action or physically acting it out, adding up the feet as you go. With all the wonderful rhyme and wordplay, it’d be great for Reader’s Theater! Doggone Feet will be so doggone much fun for your students!

For more information, please visit Leslie’s website at helakoskibooks.com.

It’s time to Bawk & Roll!

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Elvis Poultry and his back-up chicks are back, so hop on this tour bus and get ready to Bawk & Roll! Tammi Sauer and Dan Santat made this follow-up book just as irresistible as their first tail-shaker, Chicken Dance. Marge and Lola are now officially back-up dancers for the King of the Roost himself, Elvis Poultry. But when the lights go down and the curtains go up, Marge and Lola are truly chicken, too overwhelmed to flap a wing or shake a feather. Picturing the crowd in their underwear doesn’t help them (although your kids will looove that scene!), relaxing with bubble baths and meditation doesn’t do the trick, but with a little help from their friends, these chickens end up really cooking on stage.

For those of us looking for great books to compare/contrast to meet the Integration of Knowledge and Ideas Common Core State Standard (RL 3.9 if you’re playing CCSS Bingo at home), share Chicken Dance and Bawk & Roll with your kids. Compare what Marge and Lola do in each book – how they overcome their fears, how the other characters in the books help them, etc. Tammi Sauer and Dan Santat have so much fun, free stuff on their website: elvispoultrybooks.com. You can print off and make your own rockin’ Elvis Poultry sunglasses and wear them while you watch the author and the illustrator teach you how to do different dances! These books would be fantastic for Readers’ Theater scripts and so fun and easy for a Storybox if you put cut-out characters with book for kids to retell the story. Guaranteed, all your little ones will say after hearing Bawk & Roll, “Thank you. Thankyouverymuch.”

Follow the Bawk & Roll tour bus as it rolls across the internet:

TEAM BAWK

April 2-6 Rob Sanders: Picture This!

http://robsanderswrites.blogspot.com/

April 3 Julie Danielson: Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

http://blaine.org/sevenimpossiblethings/

April 4 Jennifer Bertman: From the Mixed-Up Files of Jennifer Bertman

http://writerjenn.blogspot.com/

April 4 Kristen Remenar: Author, Librarian, National Speaker – Hey, that’s me! 🙂

http://kristenremenar.com/

April 5 Julie Hedlund: Write Up My Life

http://writeupmylife.com/

April 6 Jennifer Rumberger: Children’s Author

http://www.jenniferrumberger.com/

For more information, visit tammisauer.com or dansantat.com.

Duck! Rabbit!

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Those of you who know me know I have a huge author-crush on Amy Krouse Rosenthal. I think her books are brilliant, and Duck! Rabbit! by AKR (as I like to call her) and Tom Lichtenheld gets me every time. Is this character a duck? A rabbit? Neither, or both? Two unseen narrators debate just what this critter is, and we realize that it’s all in how you look at it.

This book is a cool lesson in perspective. You can work the science angle if you’re doing a unit on the five senses and talk about how we see things. Get little plastic magnifying glasses, binoculars, or sheets of colored transparent plastic and let little ones experiment with looking through them. Share optical illusion books and art by M. C. Escher. Talk about how differences in perspective mean that we can have differences of opinion, too. We can see things from different points of view, and one way is necessarily better than the other. Share Duck! Rabbit! and see what happens!

For more information, visit Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s website: whoisamy.com or Tom Lichtenheld’s website: tomlichtenheld.com.