** Goodnight Moon **

One of my all time favorite stories as a child was Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. A lot of children grew up with this story and it is well known for its colorful and appealing illustrations. It is a great book for beginner readers, because it uses a lot of simple words and has pictures to go along with it. It uses a lot of adjetives and the illustrations correlate well with the words, so it is fun for kids to match the words with pictures. It is neat because each page alternates colored pages with black and white, so you could start reading this book to a small infant. I would strongly encourage it for parents to read it to their children at a young age. I still love this book even as an adult!

Curious George

When teaching a child how to read, it is important to not only teach how to read the text, but also the parts of a book, and how actually how to read it. A great beginning reader is the Curious George series by Margret Rey and Alan J. Shalleck. These books are based off a TV series, but they seem to be very popular with the young children. Also when teaching children how to read, it is important to stress the literary elements. In the book, Curious George Goes to School, is a great book to start off with, because it would be easy for kids to relate to. It is a story about George’s, the monkey, first day of school and how it does not start off too smoothly. In art class, George had kind of made a mess of things and all the art work was scattered all through the classroom. At first George was very sad, but at the end of the story it ended up being a good thing, because they found the missing artwork. It is a good story, of how sometimes things might not start off all that great, but in the end it worked out for the better.

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom was a childhood favorite of mine. It had been awhile since I had last read it, and I had forgotten how much I loved it. It is a great book to help young children learn their alphabet and it puts it in a creative way, in which it goes through the letters without the children even realizing. It also has a great rhythm to it, so it is an easy story for children to help read along and also very entertaining. There are a variety of different activities a teacher could do with this book to help teach about letters. As a child, we acted out a little skit using this theme, and each student was a different letter. It is a great book and I would highly recommend it in the classroom.

Oral Comprehensive Lesson

In one of my reading classes I am taking this semester, we are discussing the variety of ways you can test a student's comprehension of stories. One of the methods we went over, I thought was very interesting. It was an oral comprehensive assessment, and it seemed very effective. I just recently read Franklin and the Thunderstorm by Paulette Bourgeois. I used to love Franklin stories as a child, so I thought I would use this story as an example. As a teacher I would have the student read the book and than answer the following questions. As a teacher you would pick a topic that related to the book, so in this case it could be weather. During the first part, you pick a subject and have the student name as many words, that relate to that subject in a certain period of time and also compare different subjects.

Naming:
1) Different types of weather
2) Types of clothing to wear correlating to the weather
3) Compare the different seasons

Describing... ( You can pick a word in the book, to define)
1) Barometer

Pictures: ( Have the students think of pictures to represent parts of the story to help them remember it)
1) Turtle (Franklin)
2) Beaver or Snail (Friends)
3) Clouds/Rain
4) Rainbow

Comprehension Questions: ( Could do this at the end of the lesson)
1) What was Franklin scared of and why?
2) Where did Franklin and his friends go to get away from the storm at the beginning?
3) What did Hawk say that the thunder was?
4) How did Franklin overcome his fear?
5) Is there anything you are scared of? If so how could you overcome it?

This is just an example of how you could set up this lesson and it could go for all ages. This one in particular would probably be best for 1st or 2nd graders.

Biography of Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss wasmy inspirtation to begin reading as a child. One of the first books I ever read was The Foot Book, and I read it so much that I could probably still recite it by memory today. Dr. Seuss is an amazing author and his books are known for their unique rhyming text and loveable quotes. I know even as an adult some of his quotes are absolutely inspiring. Seuss has written and illustrated about 44 books and a lot of them have been made into films, such as The Grinch and The Cat and the Hat. Theodor Suess Geisel was born in Massachusetts and his family had immigrated from Germany. He went to Oxford with all intentions of earning his Ph.D, however he did not quite make it, so the "Dr" is in acknowledgement for his father's dreams for Seuss. His love for writing and drawing started at a young age. He was inspired to write children's book later on in his adult life when he had read an article about the low literacy rate of American schools due to the material not interesting children. As we know today, Dr. Seusss completely changed that for children and his books became famous for teaching young children how to read and sparking their passion for reading.

Response to Alice

Our discussion in class gave me a new insight on the book Alice Adventure’s in Wonderland. I had never read the book before, but I had seen the movie as a child. I was never a big fan, but I think reading it at an older age will allow me to see it in a different perspective. I had never realized it was a story about a young girl finding her own identity. I remember from the movie, how she kept changing sizes and it really frustrated me. Now looking at it mirroring a girl not being happy with her physical identity and constantly wanting to change it completely makes it more intriguing. This is a great story and most everyone has probably been able to relate to it, in the sense of not knowing really who they are.

Factors of Fantasy Literature

When you either are reading a fantasy book or want to teach a unit on fantasy there are many important factors to take notice of. The main theme of fantasy stories are suspending your disbelief and allowing you to be placed in an unrealistic world. Authors can do this in a variety of different ways and there are so many examples out there. I have been reading Charlotte’s web and I did an analysis of how E.B. White chose to go about it. He kept the setting for the most part in a very realistic setting, but allowed the characters to take the reader into a more fantastical situation. The animals in this story are humanized in the sense they can communicate with each other, they have feelings and morals like humans and are forced to make decisions, however this behavior is only between the animals. The humans in the story have no insight that the animals can talk to each other. The key to fantasy literature is to not make it too unrealistic, the reader needs to be able to somewhat relate and allow themselves to be engaged before it becomes unbelievable.