Category Archives: Vocabulary

The Question on Everyone’s Mind

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It’s August, and there’s one big question everyone has been asking: Is Your Buffalo Ready for Kindergarten? Thank goodness Audrey Vernick and Daniel Jennewein have made this fantastic book to help us find the answer. First of all, does your buffalo have a backpack? If so, your buffalo is good to go! Tell your buffalo not to worry about being the only one in class with horns and a hump – your buffalo can be proud of being the state animal for Oklahoma! And, as author Vernick reminds us, one of the things we learn in kindergarten is that everyone is special in his or her own way.

After you share this book with your students, find out what your state animal is, and make your own version of the book.  Let students come up with what your animal needs to do or have in order to be successful in kindergarten. It’s a great way to soothe any fears about achieving this major milestone, for students and their parents as well!

Update: Audrey Vernick, extremely awesome person and the author of this book, let me know that there is a free downloadable teacher’s guide for Is Your Buffalo Ready for Kindergarten available on her website! Gotta love free! Go to audreyvernick.com to get it.

 

Bubble Trouble

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“Little Mabel blew a bubble, and it caused a lot of trouble…
such a lot of bubble trouble in a bibble-bobble way.
For it broke away from Mabel as it bobbed across the table,
where it bobbled over Baby, and it wafted him away.”

I double-dog dare you to pick up Bubble Trouble (written by Margaret Mahy and illustrated by Polly Dunbar) and not read this tongue-twisting treat aloud. If you are an educator, we can babble and gabble about phonological awareness, the power of interesting rhyme to help young listeners hear the distinct sounds in words and therefore be better able to decode those words on a page, but frankly, the most important reason you could ever have to share this book with a listener of any age is simply for the pleasure of the patter.

After you and your kids have giggled and goggled until your brains are boggled (oh Margaret Mahy, I love you so), it’s the perfect lead-in to a science experiment with bubbles. There are a variety of homemade bubble solutions – most with dish soap, some with glycerin, some with corn syrup – and how fun would it be to test different solutions, or to vary the amount of one of the components to see how the bubbles are affected? What happens if you blow harder or softer? What if you blow through a square-shaped hole – could you make square bubbles?

If you can get your hands on Mercer Mayer’s wordless book Bubble Bubble, you’d have two fun, distinctly different books about bubbles to compare and contrast.

(For those of you who may be fretful and upset-ful about the baby in the bubble, fear not: thanks to pink and purple patchwork, the rebel treble Abel, and a well-aimed pebble, the baby boy rebounded to his mother’s safe embrace.)

 

Chew on these great books

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In a recent Remenar Seminar, a principal pointed out that I share lots of stories, but not a lot of non-fiction. That’s something I’m working on – I love fiction, but I know many learners really respond to informational text. So, I’m trying to pair up books on irresistible topics – like bubble gum!

I’m stuck on the bouncy rhyme of Lisa Wheeler’s Bubble Gum, Bubble Gum: “chewy-gooey bubble gum/ icky-sticky bubble gum/ melting in the road/ along comes a toad” who gets stuck. Then a shrew gets stuck, and more animals get stuck – until a truck comes along! What will they do? Chew! And blow a bubble that lifts them from danger, until…

This makes a terrific storybox. Put this book, with its great illustrations by Laura Huliska-Beith, and puppet characters on wooden sticks in the storybox with a container of homemade pink playdough (make sure it’s non-toxic because one of your sweetpeas will probably try chewing on it) to retell the story.

Then, share Pop! The Invention of Bubble Gum by Megan McCarthy. It is excellent non-fiction for younger students. The topic is sure to grab their attention, the text is short but interesting and full of fun facts, and the illustrations are large enough for a group read. At the end of the book, McCarthy adds lots more information (like who holds the world record for largest bubble) for kids who want to really sink their teeth into the subject.

Want a super-duper Dubble Bubble science extension? Ask your students, “Do you think bubble gum will weigh more or less after you chew it?” Use the scientific method of forming a hypothesis, listing materials and procedure, controlling variables (everyone chews the same kind of gum for the same amount of time), and see what your results are!

Plant some new ideas

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Spring has finally arrived, even in Michigan, and many of us are pulling out plant and garden books. Here’s a good one to add to your bunch: Up, Down and Around by Katherine Ayers and Nadine Bernard Westcott.  In this book, kids learn that some things grow up, like corn and broccoli, some things grow down, like carrots and potatoes, and some things grow around, like pumpkin vines and green beans. You can talk about prepositions and location words, making a fun center with seed packets and magnets. (Being the frugal fanatic, I’ve started collecting free magnets from pizza parlors and real estate offices, cutting them up and hot-gluing them to pictures I want to use on magnetic boards. And did you know that cookie sheets are magnetic and make great little portable retelling boards? Cool, huh?) So, hot-glue magnets to the backs of seed packets and let kids sort them by what grows above or below ground on cookie sheets labeled “above” and “below”. If you have a green thumb, plant fun veggies like green beans and let kids ooh over the curling vines. And, if you are like me, the Dr. Kevorkian of the plant world, do a simpler experiment: Bring in potatoes, point out the “eyes”, and leave them in paper bags for a couple of weeks to see if they’ll sprout! Tie this book in with Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens, or pair it with non-fiction books like The Vegetables We Eat by Gail Gibbons. Hooray for spring!

Why Nursery Rhymes Work

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I had the pleasure of attending a kindergarten “family night” at an elementary school. The theme was nursery rhymes, and once again I was reminded why these rhymes are so powerful. I could (and often do) go on for days about the phonological awareness that rhyme builds, how children who are read to are exposed to thousands more words than those who hear only daily conversation and television, how we learn words best in meaningful context and how the rich language of nursery rhymes develops a child’s vocabulary, but I know I’m preaching to the choir. Instead, allow me to share with you one of my favorite nursery rhyme books, Big Fat Hen by Keith Baker. This is my go-to nursery rhyme book for littlest listeners, and all my students who are building number recognition feel like rock stars because they can read this so easily. The pictures are huge, perfect for a group share, and the text is quickly read to wiggly ones.

One of the best parts of the kindergarten family night for me was seeing how successful the students felt as they read nursery rhymes to me from books and off of posters. Because of the short, rhyming text, nursery rhymes are easily memorized, so those who are still developing word recognition and decoding skills can feel successful as they “read” from memory the rhymes. I brought a pretend candlestick (a toilet paper tube wrapped in construction paper with a red tissue paper flame which is as crafty as I get) and had students act out “Jack Be Nimble” after we read the rhyme. Amazingly fun and super-easy, make a poster of the rhyme, have 3×5 cards with your students’ names to tape up over the word “Jack”, and let your little ones be part of the rhyme.