Tag Archives: Kindergarten

Reading Comprehension Unit – Snowmen at Night

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Reading Comprehension

“Snowmen at Night” is a delightful read aloud about the hijinks of snowmen while everyone else is sleeping. Your students will love the adventures and the rhyming text. This FREE resource includes phonics, comprehension and Vocabulary/Sight Words activities to go with the book, “Snowmen at Night” by Caralyn Buehner. If you love this book, be sure to check out this blog post about the companion book, “Snowmen at Christmas”!

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Grab the Snowmen at Night resource here!

This read aloud unit includes activities to teach Reading Comprehension, Phonics, Sight Words and Vocabulary. The lesson includes supports for teaching the concepts, a fun Story Sticks sequencing craft, center activities and practice pages.

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What is Included in this Kindergarten Read Aloud Resource?

This resource features a variety of phonics and reading comprehension activities based on the delightful book “Snowmen at Night” by Caralyn Buehner. Your students will LOVE this fun story with its imaginative illustrations, and have a blast practicing phonics skills of letter names, reading sight words, and the connected text of the emergent reader. You will love these reading activities that keep students engaged and learning.

The included lesson plans give you plenty of ideas for using these reading activities to teach important literacy skills such as uppercase and lowercase letter match, sequencing and retelling the story, word families, and sight words. Students will love the Story Sticks craft that helps them reinforce the concept of sequencing. They will also love the Spin and Read circles that help them practice reading word families!

Bring together comprehension and sight words with the emergent reader – Where do Snowmen Go?. The books gives students practice with sight words, setting of a story and emergent reader skills such as left to right, concept of a word, and more! There are plenty of reading activities to keep the learning going!

How Does This Unit Fit with the Science of Reading?

I have been learning and writing a lot about Science of Reading lately. The Reading League is the driving force behind helping educators bring Science to our classrooms. They advocate for the Simple View of Reading.

The Simple View of Reading is WR x LC = RC.

The Simple View says that Word Recognition (WR) x Language Comprehension (LC) = Reading Comprehension (RC). In other words, Reading Comprehension is the goal, and students reach comprehension when they understand the language and recognize the words.

This unit fits into that formula in a number of ways.

  1. Word Recognition depends on letter recognition and the ability to use the sounds of letters to pronounce words. Those skills are supported in the Phonics section of this resource. The Sight Word practice is also key for building strong Word Recognition skills (there are two included sight words activities in this resource). The Spin and Read activity is also a fun phonics activity that helps students learn to read word families. Sound Mapping is another great phonics activity included in this resource.
  2. Language Comprehension is more complicated. Vocabulary development is one piece of that process, and the Write Around the Room activity supports vocabulary development.
  3. Literacy Knowledge is also considered part of Language Comprehension, and this unit supports Literacy Knowledge with the Text Dependent Questions, The Sequencing activities, the Story Sticks

This Reading Comprehension Unit brings Science-based components together to help students grow as readers. For more information on all that is included in the Science of Reading, be sure to check out these blog posts.

Love This Reading Comprehension Unit? Check out these…

Kindergarten Read Aloud Phonics, Comprehension, Sight Words

Click to check out these resources and more in my TPT store! 

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Happy Teaching!

Susan

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Teaching Gratitude with Gratitude Stones

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This time of year it’s easy to feel grateful. Crisp fall weather, kids who have settled into school routines and begun to learn, pumpkin pie….. These are just a few of the things on my gratitude list this year. And, as always, I was looking for a way to teach that to my students when I found this delightful book, “Gratitude is my Superpower” by Alicia Ortego. The book uses rhyme to tell the story of Betsy and her turtle, Mr. T. Betsy is worried about her pet, so her mom takes her to the garden, and gives her a stone. Betsy learns to use her Gratitude Stone to turn her worry into gratitude, and then, she passes it on to another worried child.

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This blog post will discuss:

Gratitude is My Superpower Read Aloud

I read the story to my kindergarten kiddos today, and it really resonated with them. Many of them connect with feeling worried and sad and disappointed, all emotions that Betsy experiences in the book. To help reinforce the concept of gratitude, today, we made gratitude stones of our own!

Introducing the book

I introduce the book by telling the students that we are going to learn about gratitude. We clap out the word and learn that it has three syllables. Then we act it out by putting our hands on our hearts, and then gesturing out to the world, because gratitude is something that comes from your heart and moves into the world! As we read the book, there are several natural stopping spots where we discuss what Betsy is grateful for, and then I invited the students to share their own ideas. Finally, we made our own gratitude stones to keep for awhile and then to give away.

Making Gratitude Stones in YOUR classroom!

This was a truly wonderful lesson – one of those moments that resonates with kids and gets them excited about learning and growing. As we worked, the kids naturally fell into conversation about things they are grateful for. As they worked, I also practiced gratitude words and phases with them, like “Thank you” and “I’m grateful for….” And the best part was, the kids spontaneously thanked the cafeteria workers when we went to lunch a few minutes later! If you’d like to do this with your kids, here is how I do it!

Grab these supplies:

  1. River Rocks
  2. Mod Podge
  3. Stickers – I like these hearts, but any small stickers will work. Look for stickers about a half inch so that they don’t wrinkle when you put them on a round surface.
  4. Foam paint brushes

I put the kiddos to work on a math task that they can do independently, then call 3-4 students back to the STEAM table to work. Each one chooses the rock that fits their hand the best, and I use a sharpie marker to write their name on the bottom.

After students choose the “Just Right” rock for them, they decorate with a few stickers. Some students want me to write the word “Gratitude” on the rock, so I use the Sharpie to do that.

Students apply the Mod Podge with the brushes. A thin, even layer works best. Students use their fingers to smooth out any wrinkles in the stickers.

The rocks are dry after about an hour, and they are so cute! The kids love them! Check out these pictures, and then give it a try!