When I picture Kindergarten from my time, I think of: play time, story time, center time, nap time, circle time, snack time, and lunch time. Does anyone else picture it that way?
With the push to independently read at a Level D at the end of Kindergarten, most often listening to a story (especially a fiction book) can be pushed aside to make room for guided reading and studying nonfiction.
This is an injustice to our students. Why? Students need to know and deserve to hear the classic fiction stories. I base these thoughts on the fact that later in upper grades, students are often asked to compare/connect a story they are reading to a classic story.
Teaching at a Title I school, I know that a lot of my students do not get to hear these stories at home. I want to give each of my students access to texts that their peers would have heard.
What I mean when I say classics: Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, Stone Soup, The Little Red Hen, Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, The Ugly Duckling, and many others that you probably remember from your own childhood.
So the challenge is...how do we use the classic stories we know and love to teach the academic content of today's Kindergarten??
Here is what I have been doing in my classroom.
1. Each week I pick one book to study (could be nonfiction as well). Usually it is tied to whatever we are studying in science/social studies. Sometimes I just pick a fiction book and work on ELA standards.
2. I also pick a STEAM activity to correlate with the book. Examples below.
2. Over the course of 5 days, I teach the story and its theme. This week I am doing Stone Soup and sharing.
- Monday: Students listen as the story is read by the teacher. At the end, students share their initial reactions and thoughts with a friend. I also introduce the theme for the week and place it on some sort of anchor chart (usually a bubble map). This week my theme is sharing. *We take time to add new knowledge from the books/discussion/activity to clarify the theme each day.
- Tuesday: Quickly review the story (who, where, what?). Reread the text and stop to discuss and clarify 4-5 words. I pre-select the words based on what I think my students might not have heard before or understand. We stop at the word, look at the picture, and listen really hard for clues. Then the students guess and share the reasoning about the meaning of the word. We usually flip the word with what we think it might be and read it to see if it makes sense. This teaches students about using context clues AND it widens their vocabulary. Often I hear students using the words correctly WAY after that story has been taught. Our words this week for Stone Soup are: fancy, plenty, bubbling, stone, and barley.
- Wednesday: Review the vocabulary words (usually I reference the words in a retell of the story). Discuss 3-5 text dependent question and reread the part of the text that applies to the question. Have students answer and share why they think their answer is true (make connections to their schema, infer, look for clues in the text/picture to support their answer).
- Thursday: Review vocabulary. Use the vocabulary words in a question discussion. Each word has its own question. For example: The word is fancy. What did the old lady put on the table to make it fancy? How would you dress if you wanted to be fancy? Where is somewhere fancy that you might go? After our discussion, we read another book on the same topic (fiction or nonfiction) and compare and contrast the two OR make connections between the text.
- Friday: Wrap up with an art activity, science experiment, STEM challenge, or cooking activity (and cooking totally teachers science)
The lesson style described is also referred to as "Close Reading." I recommend checking out Tara West at the Little Minds at Work blog for more information!
Here are pictures and details of past activities:
Goldilocks and the Three Bears: We did not know what porridge was so we cooked and ate it. Tasty! You can also graph "Did you like the porridge?" to tie in math. I am very lucky to have a stove in my classroom!
Three Little Pigs: We used toothpicks, marshmallows, gummy bears (I prefer gum or spice drops but they were hard to find) and paper plates to build our house. I did not say it had to look like a house, just that it stood up. Then we went around and chanted "I will huff, and puff, and blow your house down!" while pointing my hairdryer (the big bad wolf) at the houses. The tepee style house did the best! If their house fell over, they had time to make design changes and try again :)
These are the cute pigs we made. We also added labeled and I put some questions/responses on the board. This is a "work in progress." **I will add a template tomorrow!
The Three Billy Goats Gruff: It was so hard for me to figure out what the bridge would cross for this one. I finally walked around dollar tree until I saw the baking section and the idea came to make two areas of grass with a blue river in the middle from frosting. I dyed one can of frosting green and one can of frosting blue, then painted the frosting across the plate with a Popsicle stick. So we used blue frosting, green frosting, toothpicks, gum drops, marshmallows, and Popsicle sticks to build bridges. I put "three goats" (really cows from my farm counters) and the rule was the goats could not get any blue on them/fall off the bridge while we chanted the troll's speech from the story. If their bridge failed, I asked them to go back and make changes to improve it.
Stone Soup: One of our vocabulary words is bubbling. These week we are going to talk about why soup would bubble and the changes happening to our veggies as they cook. Here is a snapshot of the flyer I am sending home.
Thanks for reading! I plan to update soon about our craft for the Three Little Pigs, Stone Soup, and how our soup turned out. Check back for craft templates.
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