The Three Little Bears-Traditional or Folk Literature

The Three Little Bears by Joseph Jacobs is about a curious little girl who decides to take a trip through the woods.  When she comes upon a house she decides to see if anybody is home, and to her surprise it is empty.  Without thinking twice she walks in and sees three bowls of porridge.  She tries all three but finds the big bowl to be too hot, and the middle bowl to be too cold, but the little bowl just right, so she eats it all up, Next she goes over to the three chairs and tries each out. The big chair was too hard and the medium chair was too soft but the small chair was just right so she sits in it until she breaks the bottom through.  After all that she gets tired so she decides to go upstairs and sees three beds.  The big beds pillow is too high, and the medium beds pillow is too flat, but the little bed is just perfect for her afternoon nap.  When mamma bear, daddy bear and baby bear come home they notice their stuff has been messed with so they begin to look around.  After making their way upstairs baby bear finds the little girl.   She hears the baby bears high voice, wakes up, and in fear of the bears runs away as fast as she can.  An to this day the bears have never seen that little girl again, it may be because she got hurt on her way home, or because she was grounded for skipping school, but that is something we will never know!  This story is one of my favorites because I remember my parents reading it to me when I was younger.  Reading this story to young kids is great because it allows them to use their imagination.  For an activity with this I would have my students write an ending to what happened to the little girl after she left the house.  This would allow them to use their imagination and be creative; it would also help them with their writing skills.  I think it would be really interested to hear what ideas they could come up with about how the legend ends.  Also, I think the students would really like it if they could share their ending to the class themselves!

Elizabeth Blackwell First Woman Doctor-Autobiography-Chatper Book

            Elizabeth Blackwell First Woman Doctor, by Franzcene Sabin and Joann Early Macken is something that all young children should read.  Elizabeth was born in 1821 when woman were not given equal rights as men.  Most men believed that woman were not as smart, and couldn’t do all the things that men could do, and that is why this story is so inspirational.  Elizabeth Blackwell grew up in a loving and supportive family.  Her dad owned a sugar company and for the beginning of her life she lived in luxury and wealth, until her dad’s plant burnt down and the next thing they knew their life had been turned upside down.  The Blackwell family packed up and moved to America where they thought their new and improved life would start.  In New York they were again faced with many challenges with her dads business and illnesses within the family.  Not long after they moved to America Elizabeth’s dad fell ill and died, quickly followed by her two aunts.  With an effort to help the family out Elizabeth began teaching music lessons but soon realized that her true dream was to become a doctor.  With much work and many struggles Elizabeth began applying for med school, which no woman had ever been accepted into.  Finally in 1847 she was accepted to Geneva Medical College where she began her dream.  Although there were many struggles along the way Elizabeth pushed through school and continued towards her future.  One day Elizabeth came down with a bad eye infection which put her back about seven months and caused her to loose her left eye, but that still didn’t stop her.  Elizabeth continued on and became the first woman doctor.  She began to promote “preventive medicine” and gave speeches on the importance of cleanliness and proper diet.  Elizabeth Blackwell practiced as a doctor until she was 89 years old and she will always be remembered for all the lives she saved.  This book is great for students to read because it shows that everybody should be treated equally and that woman can do anything just as good as men.  Also, it shows integrity and courage that Elizabeth had her entire life.  Like I mentioned in another blog I would use this book as a book report and have students dress up as the character they picked.  Elizabeth Blackwell would be a great character for this because she is so inspirational to me and to many other people, and she is a true hero of her time!

Amelia Earhart Adventures in the Sky-Autobiography-Chapter Book

Amelia Earhart Adventures in the Sky by Francene Sabin and Joanne Mattern is a book that captures the true hero we all know and love!  Amelia Earhart grew up during the time period when girls were supposed to wear dresses, play with dolls, be as lady like as possible, but Amelia and her younger sister Muriel were different from the other girls.  They grew up climbing trees, playing baseball and basketball with their parents, doing everything they were told not too by others.  Amelia grew up living on the wild, and dangerous side, always willing to try new things, and that’s why when she saw her first plane at eleven years old her life would never be the same.  Amelia went on to high school and college to get her education, but she never felt her life meant anything until she moved away with her sister to help wounded soldiers.  There she felt like her life meant more that just books and school work.  On one of her days off Amelia and her friend went to an airfield nearby where, where one of the pilots decided to play a trick on Amelia and her friend and drove the plane right toward the two of them.  Like any normal person her friend took off running, but brave Amelia just stood there fearless!  After the plan passed she said, “I believe that little red airplane said something to me as it swished by”, and later she wrote “I determined then that I would some day ride one of these machines”.  In 1920 her dream came true when she went home to visit her family, she was given the chance to ride in one and she was even allowed to help control it.  From then on she began lessons and in 1922 she received her pilots license.  Amelia became known for many of her awards and accomplishments.  She became the first pilot male or female to fly solo from Hawaii to California; from California to Mexico, and many other places as well.  Amelia Earhart became an inspiration for many people to take up flying, but on June 1 1917 she set off for a trip around the world that will never be forgotten.  Throughout the trip Amelia and her partner Fred kept a diary about where they had traveled and where they were headed next, but on July 2 they set off for Howland Island, but unfortunately never made it.  From that day on Amelia and her partner were never seen or heard of again, but remain legends until this day forward.  I think this book is so great because it shows that you can be whatever you want to be as long as you believe and try your hardest at becoming that.  Throughout Amelia’s life she always did her own thing and never conformed to what others wanted her to be and I think that is one reason she became the woman she did.  I would use this book in many ways in my classroom.  One way, which I remember doing when I was in fourth grade was using it as a book report.  When I was in fourth grade we were all given a list of famous people to pick from to do a book report on, so I picked Amelia Earhart.  After reading books and doing research on our person we had to dress up like that person and then give a short speech about them to the class as if we were that person.  I really enjoyed this lesson and think that many other students would enjoy it also because dressing up is always fun and by giving the speech from our persons point of view allowed us to become that character! 

The Courage of Sarah Noble-Multicultural and International Literature- Chapter Book

The Courage of Sarah Noble by Alice Dalgliesh is such a great inspirational story for many. The Courage of Sarah Noble is based on a true story about an eight-year-old girl that must be brave as her dad and her take a journey to their new home.  When her dad buys new land in New Milford, near a settlement of Indians Sarah steps up to join him in his journey and be his cook while he builds their new house.  Along the way Sarah faces many challenges that she must learn to be brave through.  The first night in the woods Sarah becomes very scared when she hears all the wild animals that are also sleeping there with them.  Here dad has to keep reminding her to keep her courage and stay brave, and that he will not let anything happen to her.  The next night they find a family that allows them to stay with them for the night, but Sarah soon realizes they aren’t as nice as they seem.  The children continuously tell Sarah that the Indians are mean and are going to chop their heads off, and the mom keeps telling Sarah she is too young to be on such a journey.  Finally when Sarah and her dad arrive at their new home there is much work to be done, so while her dad is off building the new house, Sarah is making new friends with their Indian neighbors.  Finally after a great amount of time Sarah’s dad has finished the house and must go get the rest of her family while Sarah stays with her new friends Tall John and his family! In the end Sarah’s family is reunited in their new home and Sarah is now happier than ever!  This is a great story because it is based off true events and it teaches about bravery and courage and what it means to be each of those.  Also, in shows what it was like in the 1700s when people really did have to do things such as this.  I would use this book in my class to teach about courage and bravery and what each of those words mean and have students reflect on what those words meant to them and write about somebody that they found brave!  Also, it is a great way to tie in the past and how people lived back in the day when they did have to travel by foot to find new land and what it was like with Native Americans in the 1700s.  Also, because this book is based on a true story it will help students realize that children their age really did have to be brave for their families in order to survive.  This book would be great to teach about the lifestyles of Native Americans and those of a white family during that time period.  Along with writing about someone they see as brave it would be cool to have students create an acrostic poem using the word brave or courage to represent what each word means! 

The Three Little Pigs-Traditional Folk Literature-Wordle

http://www.wordle.net/gallery/wrdl/697297/The_three_little_pigs

 

The Three Little Pigs by Joseph Jacobs is such a great piece of literature.  I remember always loving this great story about the three little pigs and the big bad wolf.  When three little pigs set off from home they all must build their own house for safety.  The first little pig builds a house of straw, but the wolf easily blows it over, the second pig makes his house out of sticks, but then again the wolf blows it over.  The last little pig is smarter and decides to build his house out of brick, which the wolf soon realizes he can’t destroy, and with much disappointment leaves the pig alone to live happily ever after.  I would use this story in my classroom as an example of folk literature for students; it is a great book to make a wordle with.  I had a great time making a wordle for this story because there are so many ways to describe it.  I think a great activity for teaching about folk literature and stories such as this is to have students each pick their favorite traditional or folk literature story such as this one and make a wordle for it.  Then we could show the wordle to the class and the students would have to guess which story it was describing based on the clues!

Georgs's Marevlous Medicine-Science Fiction-Chapter Book

George’s Marvelous Medicine by Roald Dahl is a great book for those who like magic potions, or what George calls his “marvelous medicine”. In this book we see a young boy who is trapped at home with his so-called “evil” grandmother.  With his dad out farming and his mom gone, George in stuck in the house to watch over his grandmother and give her any medicine she might need.  The minute his mom leaves George’s grandmother turns to an old selfish, bossy, lady who doesn’t care about anybody but herself.  She immediately starts bossing George around to go get her tea and make it perfectly the way she likes it, then she begins telling him that he needs to stop growing.  George tells her she is wrong that he has to grow to become a grown up but she replies by telling him that she was short and she was a grown up and that it was stupid for him to keep growing.  George tries to ignore her non-sense but she is very persistent and continues to nag him, becoming more and more witch like each second.  George quickly becomes scared so he runs into another room shutting the door hoping to get away, but he can still hear her telling him he will never be able to get far enough away from her.  With that said George decides to make a potion that will cure her and hopefully make her a better person.  Not being able to go anywhere George gathers up whatever he can find from around the house.  He uses, bathroom items, things from his dads shed, lipstick, all sorts of powders from the kitchen, pretty much everything he can get his hands on.  Once he has finished his secret medicine he decides its time to test it out.  Disguised as her normal medicine George slips it in and then realizes that his grandmother has become a giant, although a nicer one at that!  When his parents arrive home, his dad quickly takes a liking to the idea, thinking it will help him on his farm, but to his disappointment George cannot remember the formula to his medicine.  They begin testing with everything he can remember but all they can come up with is something that makes things shrink.  His grandmother sees this and begins drinking her tea without realizing that she is shrinking herself into nothing.  In such a short amount and without knowing it George had mad a marvelous medicine, which made is grandma disappear!  This is such a funny story to me because a young boy with nothing to do one day decides to make a potion that will hopefully cure his nagging old grandmother, and without knowing it he does just that.  I think children would really love this book because it is funny, exciting, and what kid doesn’t like to read about witches and magic potions or medicines.  One way I would use this book is for a class discussion.  I would have students choose a side whether they supported or disagreed with George and what he did to his grandma, and then have them use their book to find details that might support their idea or claim.  Then we would come together as a class and discuss the points of views and the different details that support each other.  This would help students with working with book details, and finding clues within the book, and it would help with discussion techniques and debating.  Also, having a class discussion will give everybody a chance to say something and give their opinion, which will help with social skills all around.

Mia Hamm Winners Never Quit-Biography

As most of you all know Mia Hamm is one of the worlds best soccer players we have ever seen.  In 1979 Mia Hamm who was eight was in the beginning of her UN known soccer career while living in Texas.  Mia Hamm was the youngest woman to ever play with the United States National Team at the age 15.  She won her first world cup at the young age of 19 and then in 1996 she won a gold medal in the Olympic games in Atlanta, where over 80,000 fans came to support her. In college Mia Hamm attended UNC where she lead her team to four NCAA championships.  Mia Hamm is known for many accomplishments, she scored the final goal against China in the world cup in 1999, which was rated the highest rated woman sports event on TV history in the United States.  One of her biggest accomplishments is that at the age of 27 Mia became the world’s leading goal scorer in international competition for males and females!  As one can see Mia Hamm is not only a famous athlete but also a leader for many people around the world.  Mia grew up learning how important it is to be part of a team, she always said that there was no me in “Mia”, and this lesson has helped lead her to be who she is today.  Winners Never Quit, which is written by Mia, is such a great book for students to read.  Based off the true story of Mia and her life lessons, it is about a young girl who struggles with quitting when things don’t go her way.  The young girl in the story (Mia) loves to play soccer, but she hates to loose, which causes many problems when she is playing pick up games with her brother and sister and other friends of theirs.  During the games Mia has a hard time getting the ball past her sister so she decides to storm off the field and quit the game.  The next day when she is ready to play again her brother tells her that they don’t want quitters playing with them and that she will have to sit the game out.  Mia gets very upset over this and realizes that the loves soccer more than she hates loosing, so she decides to give it another shot and soon realizes that winners never quit!  This is such a great book because it tells the story about a young girl who is about to give up on her dream of playing soccer because she isn’t getting the results that she wants.  This is so important because if Mia had never learned about this lesson she wouldn’t have accomplished everything she has today.  I also really enjoyed this book because at the end it had pictures and many important facts about Mia and things she has won like I mentioned in the beginning of the paragraph.   This is definantly a book I would use in my classroom because I think so many children struggle with quitting and things not always turning out the way they want them to.  It is important they also learn that winners never quit because things aren’t always going to go their way.  I would read this to my students and as a class have them reflect on what it means to them.  I think it would be interesting to have the class sit in a circle and talk about different experiences they have had where they almost or did quit and how it affected them or what they did in the situation.       

The Magic School Bus "Lost in the Solar System"-Science Fiction

The Magic School Bus, “Lost in the Solar System” by Joanna Cole is a great science fiction book for many reasons. One reason I really enjoyed this book is because it had such great pictures!  All the pictures were bright and exciting to look at as I read.  In this story as usual Ms. Frizzle is taking her class on a trip to the planetarium to see a solar system show.  At the show the students hope to learn what a solar system is and how it works.  They want to know about orbits, what makes day and night, etc, but to their disappointment the planetarium is closed.  But if anybody knows Ms. Frizzle the fun doesn’t stop here because she decides that she will take the class to space instead.  As the bus turns into a spaceship the students learn about how real spaceships work and about something we have all heard of, gravity.  Quickly the students begin to float around because they have become weightless in space, which we also call gravity.  Next, the students step outside for a walk on the moon where they learn about channels, polar ice caps, canyons, volcanoes, dust storms, and much more! After a long day in space the students return to school with so much to tell their parents about all the cool things they learned in space.  I think this is such a great book for student’s grades 3-5 because it has many great facts about our solar system, and it creates a fun way for students to learn it.  Instead of them reading a book with all facts, they are able to read a great imaginative story about a class taking a trip to space, and through that they learn many things.  I would use this book in my class to talk about our solar system and different things that one might find there.  It would be a great book to introduce the class into the topic and then afterwards go on to teach in more detail about topics in the book such as gravity, channels, dust storms, etc.  After I had read the book and taught the lesson I would have students write a short story about a day in space from their point of view.  In this story students would need to use technical words that we had discussed, but also make it exciting and creative

Goosebumps-Science Fictio-Chapter Book

Goosebumps, Lets Get Invisible by R.L. Stine is one of those books that tend to stay in your mind forever.  I remember when I was in fourth and fifth grade I use to read Goosebumps books and think how excited and scary they were.  Lets Get Invisible used to be one of my favorite series because I always thought the idea of being invisible was cool.  What I didn’t think about until this book was that there might be some negatives about it also. Lets Get Invisible takes the reader on a trip out of this world.  As  a reader it makes you feel like you are becoming invisible just like the main character in the book.  In the book the main character Max finds a magic mirror hidden in his attic that at first appears to be just a regular mirror, but soon he realizes that it is way more than regular.  The mirror is a magic mirror that can make people invisible.  At first Max and his friends use the mirror for fun and games, until things go wrong. Max realizes that he can no longer control how long he stays invisible, and fears that this time it might be his last.  Although it seems like this book would be hard to use in a classroom I think there are many things that could be done with it.  First of all Goosebumps books are great for upper grade students because they are mysterious and weird, which many kids love!  With this book in particular I would use it to help students in preparing for the writing portion of the end of grade test.  I would have students write a paper about one thing they would do while being invisible.  The requirements for this assignment would be that students have to have a beginning, middle, and ending paragraph, a defined thesis statement, and within the middle paragraph they would need to explain three reasons why they would do what they choose while they were invisible.  This activity would help students in gaining writing skills needed for them to get better grades on the EOG writing test and for further use in writing.  Also, this would allow students to use their imagination and creativity, which I think is always good because children need to express their creativity and imagination in everything they do!

The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe-Modern Fantasy Science Fiction- Chapter book

The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S Lewis is about a land of dreams or should I said nightmares.  When four young children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy enter through the magical wardrobe they are taken to a land called Narnia.  Narnia is a magical land like they have never seen or heard of before.  There are talking animals, trees, trolls, etc. everywhere and soon the life that they all knew before will never be the same.  In Narnia the children meet the Great Lion Aslan who is like a father figure to them, but the children quickly realize that Narnia is full of more than just fun magic.  The children’s dreams turn to nightmares when they realize that the woods are not only filled with good creatures, but also an evil Ice Witch and her followers as well.  Without warning the children must join forces with Aslan and his team in the war against the evil witch.  It is up to them to help destroy the Ice Witch and those on her side and save all the good creatures that live in Narnia.  This book is one of my favorite books to read because it is so intense and it is one of those books you never want to put down because you don’t know what is about to happen next.  Due to the fact that this book is a chapter book and can be scary at some points I would only suggest older grades, such as fourth and fifth read it.  This is a great book to represent science fiction and what science fiction means.  Just recently in class we did group bookwork where we were each given a job to do within our group.  We had a person to lead the group, a person to look up words that were unfamiliar, a person to summarize the chapter, etc.  All of these jobs were important parts of the book study because they all focused on different parts of the chapter or article.  I think that as a class we could read this book and then at the end of each chapter have the class split up in groups and do these jobs, and then come back together and have a class discussion.  This would help keep everybody on the same track so that when we moved on to other parts of the book hopefully everybody would be caught up!  It would also help students learn how to pick parts out of a book on their own for future use.

The Little Red Hen- Folk Literature

The Little Red Hen by Joseph Jacobs is a great short story because there are many lessons that can be pulled from it.   This story is about a little red hen that asked a duck, cat and dog to help her plant a grain of wheat, but they all refuse.  Next, she asks for help cutting the wheat and threshing the wheat, but again they all say no.  Then, the little red hen ask “Who will help me take the wheat to the mill to have it ground into flour?” but all three say no once again. Lastly, the hen ask if they will help her make the flour into bread, but like before they all deny her.  Despite all the no’s she has gotten so far the little red hen ask “Who will help me eat the bread?” and to no surprise they all say YES, but do you want to know what that little red hen said?  She said “Oh no you won’t!” and she fed the bread to her little chicks.  Although this is a short story it has a very important message in it that I think many students, especially at young ages have a hard time with.  This story shows that it is important to help others when they need it because you never know when you will need help in return, it also show that you have to work for your earnings and that not everything in life is going to be handed to you.  The dog, cat and duck all refused to help make the bread, but in the end they all wanted to eat some even though it was not theirs.  In my classroom I would read this to the younger children because it is short so it will keep their attention span and it would be a great way to introduce classroom rules.  For example I want one of my classroom rules to be to help others and work as a team, I would explain to them how the dog, cat and duck were not being good team members so in the end they were not very happy, but if they had all helped out they would have each gotten a piece of the bread like they wanted!  This would be a good story to read before a group project so that students understand the importance of teamwork and participation in the group.  Another good activity for students would be for them to come up with a short skit about it, but instead of following it exactly have them fix it in a way that would show better team work!