“Puppy Rap, Whispers, Weather, and Time Boxes” Week 16 First Grade

Little Puppy Rap (Fiction, Levels A-J) by Alan Trussell-Cullen

My Time Box (Non-fiction, Level H) by Margie Burton

Johnny Appleseed (Non-fiction, Level H) by Christin Ditchfield

Mr. Whisper (Fiction, Level H) by Joy Cowley

Watching the Weather (Non-fiction, Level H) by Marcia Freeman

Little Puppy Rap is the cutest little puppy book you will ever see. What happens when a Mama and her 10 pups fight over the TV? They count down from 10 to 0, and someone wins in the end! This book is full of fun, catchy rhymes, and it is simply perfect for a shared reading experience. My Time Box and Johnny Appleseed are two books that work together to teach first graders about an important historical figure as well as a way to document someone’s life. Mr. Whisper won the fun award this week for sure! With its VERY LARGE PRINT to show the super loud language and its very small print to show the super whispery parts, my little first-grader loved reading every single word! Watching the Weather is a book about, you guessed it, the weather. Not only does it help students explore the differences between the seasons, but it also teaches them to read a thermometer and which temperatures are typical for which seasons.

The activity I want to highlight this week is the Social Studies Guide for My Time Box and Johnny Appleseed that comes with questions to discuss before and after reading the book. Through the content of these books and the discussion prompted by the Read with Sarah guided lesson, Malachi and I were able to talk about how we are documenting our own lives in pictures, momentos, baby books, etc. We pulled out the photo albums (electronic and printed versions) and the baby books with momentos, and talked about how special our family considers one another and how important it is to save some special things. I love it when a school conversation turns into a family-building one!

My favorite part of the week was when my little guy wrote the dictated sentence in Step 7 Connecting Writing and Reading for Mr. Whisper “He broke his big blue cup.” He was so proud of spelling each word correctly, and he even drew a big blue cup to illustrate the sentence. For more information about the AlphaSkills Read with Sarah curriculum and our family, see the AlphaSkills Blog Introduction.