Stories and Strategies

(25 Months)

When I was a teacher, one of the reading strategies we applied was prediction (what do we think will happen next).  A perfect book to introduce this strategy is Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? The story lends to beginning prediction, because it tells you who will be on the next page.  I tried this with  Little Miss and she named each animal perfectly (color and animal).  Next, I tried this with Wild One.  He would name just the animal.  I needed to prompt him for the color each time.  I was trying to think why this was happening.  Was it because he doesn't have color recognition (his sister does)?  Is it because I'm not making it clear to name the color and the animal?  I didn't do anything different between reading with Little Miss and Wild One.  Hmmm.

Since Little Miss loves little things, I printed out small pictures of each of the animals in the book.  I couldn't find my double-sided tape, so I used Crazy Glue to attach the pictures to the popsicle sticks.   Before reading the story, I let Little Miss and Wild One look at the animal sticks and told them as we read the story to choose the animal stick for the next animal.  They were all excited, with little shrieks of "yes, yes".

Before beginning the story, I asked my little ones which of the animals comes first.  No response.  I picked up the goldfish.  Does the goldfish come first?  Wild One's response, "goldfish".  Little Miss said, "noooooo".  I tried again with a few more animals, with no luck.  So, I started reading the story and asked for the brown bear.  They both said, rather loudly, "there he is".  From there on it was magic, they quickly looked at all of the animals and then they'd grab the right animal...

I found it!

There he is!

Although they love this, we "played" this "game" four times in a row, it seems a bit too easy for them.  I wish I would have thought of this a few months ago.  We're going to use these as puppets to help retell the story, and to help Wild One learn his colors.