Every year I really enjoy sharing the SC Picture Book Award Nominees with my Kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade students. For the past 2 years my daughter and I served on the committee that chose the books and I have to admit, while it was a LOT of reading, I'm really missing it this year!
We have still been having a lot of fun with our "voting books" as the kids refer to them, so I thought I would take a minute to share some of the titles we have read and what we've done with them.
We started the year with My Teacher is a Monster by Peter Brown. I shared in this post about what we did with it and our centers back in August. It was such a great book to start with and I keep referring back to it every time I start to feel a little "monster-ish" because someone isn't following directions!
Peanut Butter and Cupcake by Terry Border was a lot of fun to share and had us talking about choosing just right books. When Peanut Butter wants to make a new friend he has to talk to a lot of people before finding out who he connects with. We had some great conversations about how you have to "talk" to a lot of books (look inside and read a little) before you can really decide which one you want to read that week.We had some similar conversations with The Monkey Goes Bananas by C.P. Bloom about taking care of our books. There are a lot of things in that book that are not friendly to books (water, sand, animals, food, etc.)
We used Dog vs Cat by Chris Gall and Ivan the Shopping Mall Gorilla by Katherine Applegate to talk about fiction and nonfiction. Ivan is the only nonfiction book on the list this year, but it is so awesome!
In Breaking News: Bear Alert by David Biedrzycki we enjoyed talking about cause and effect - what was it that caused everything to happen in the story? Well, if they just hadn't poked the sleeping bear...And Pardon Me by Daniel Miyares had us in great conversation about the main idea of the story and how if the little bird had JUST been a little more POLITE maybe he might not have gotten eaten!!
Mister Bud Wears the Cone by Carter Goodrich helped us to make predictions about what we thought would happen in the story - was he going to like the cone, would he get in trouble, what was going to happen?!?
Gaston by Kelly Dipucchio was excellent for talking about characters in the story. Poor Gaston really thinks he is a poodle. It's An Orange Aardvark by Michael Hall had us in stitches while we tried to gather information as we read to figure out what was on the outside of the ants' log!
We read A Piece of Cake by LeUyen Pham after stuffing ourselves at Thanksgiving and tested our memories by seeing if we could retell the story afterward. It would also be great for sequencing! And then last week all my classes enjoyed reading Flight School by Lita Judge and discussing how giving up on your dreams isn't something you should ever do!
That's our reading list so far - I'll do a second post once we have read the rest of them and talk about our voting!
