“Jokes, Weather, Swimming, and a Funny Farm” Week 11 First Grade
Old Malolo Had a Farm (Fiction, Levels A-J, Stage 2) Retold by Joy Cowley
Weather (Non-fiction, Level F) by Margie Burton
Come for a Swim (Fiction, Level F) by Joy Cowley
A Little Book of Animal Jokes (Fiction, Level F) by Myka-Lynn Sokoloff
As usual we loved all of the books this week’s kit, but our favorites were Old Malolo Had a Farm and Weather. Old Malolo Had a Farm is a wonderfully illustrated and unique rendition of an old nursery rhyme. You won’t find Old McDonald here, nor will you find his regular old farm animals. Instead, you will find a beautiful, exotic, grandmotherly woman who has tropical farm animals to sing about. This book was truly a treat for my little first grader Malachi who absolutely loves to sing! Weather is a beautiful little book about all of the amazing ways the sky can look when we go outside each day.
The activity I want to highlight for this week is the science activity that comes with Weather. This teaches science concepts about temperature, thermometers, tornadoes, lightning, rain, snow, frost, etc., but it is still fun for first graders to read on their own. My absolute favorite thing about this book was seeing my little Malachi asking questions about frost and learning the difference between the words “thermometer” and “temperature.” These were concepts I just assumed he already knew, but it turns out he didn’t know them well enough to talk about them until after reading this book. Another fun element was that he learned about frost from this book just days before we experienced the first frost of the year while traveling through Kentucky. How fun that the very week he learns what frost is he is able to hear about it over and over on the news and then see it for himself in the morning! I’m always so impressed with the folks at AlphaSkills and how they choose books appropriate for the seasons!
For more information about the AlphaSkills Read with Sarah curriculum and our family, see the AlphaSkills Blog Introduction.