Teachers Share Their Ideas!
 Patti wrote: My class always
enjoys making a large mitten from construction paper. Cut
the mitten on the fold and staple open sides closed
leaving the wrist part open. Photo copy the animals. Have
the children discuss the sequence the animals go into the
mitten and place them into their mitten in correct order.
This activity can be done over if necessary. There are
notes for the story called Literature Notes from Frank
Schaffer. It is a large folding card with a lot of
activities for the story.
 Michelle
wrote: Try acting the story out. Use a white sheet for
the mitten. Students crawl under the sheet as each new
animal crawls into the mitten. At the end, someone can
pull the sheet off and the "animals" scurry
away. Students love this activity and will want to do it
over and over and over.......
You can make a HUGE mitten for the
bulletin board. (I even use cotton balls on the cuff
part) Then each child can choose an animal and say how
they come into the mitten, for example The Cat Crawled
in, The snake slithered in, The rhino ran in.
Rewrite
the story through interactive or shared pen writing from
the mitten's point of view. How did it feel to be lost
and have all those animals craw inside?
The white mittens Baba made for
Nicki are hard to spot if lost in the snow - thus my
activity using white mittens cut from wallpaper. I have
this old wallpaper book that is mostly made up of white
pages with different textures and occasionally a thin
stripe of a different color that is not really obvious
unless you are looking. I cut out fronts and backs -
enough to make a pair of mittens about 4 in high - in 7
designs (but all white with different textures.} I glued
them together like mittens and before laminating them I
put a different day of the week on the backside of each
pair. (that means you have to write "Monday"
and "Monday" on each one of the pair.). The
center is for visual discrimination and detail but it
will also help them to learn/recognize the spelling for
each day of the week and will be an easy check for
correct pairing and self correcting.
Cinzia
wrote: TEACHING WITH THE MITTEN: Although many of the
ideas posted above are cute- many of them do not teach
literary skills that your principal may be looking for.
When I taught first grade (I teach 2nd now), I used a big
book as a Shared Reading. The purpose of this was to read
a book with the children so that all the children could
read the book with you. Here's how it went: Monday: Give
background. Read the book to the kids. Discuss the book.
What parts of the book could really happen? What makes
the book interesting? Where does this story happen? What
would be another good title for this story? Tuesday: Read
the book again,the children help, this time have the kids
(one at a time) come up to the big book and find
particular words. Ie: Who thinks they can find
"snow". The child can find it with a flyswatter
with a hole cut in the middle (large enough for a word to
show through the window) or with highlighter tape (it
comes off) or in some way that helps the other children
too. Then you ask how they found it. "It started
with s" etc. Wednesday: You and the class read it
again. This time you cover up certain words (nouns)with
small postits that the children must figure out. You do
this ahead of time. Thurday: The class reads the book
again but this time you don't help. Using a pointer helps
the children stay together. You then do a group activity
connected to the book-like graphing their favorite
character (as mentioned above) or making a Venn diagramn
of the similarities and differences between two
characters, etc (on large butcher paper). Friday: The
children read it for the last time and create their own
class book based on the story. For example you might
decide to write a book called the hat and have different
animals come and join the hat. The students tell you what
they want to have happen-you write it for them and they
draw the picture. Each student completes one page of the
big book which you later assemble for the children to
read on their own.
|
It was so cold outside... 
Here it was the middle of July and
it started snowing!
coming
to me soon. I saw 
