A Story Hand

Along with reading many Goldilocks and the Three Bears books, we have also been focusing on Chicken Little.  We reviewed how to retell a story by using character cards.  Each student had the opportunity to be one character in the story and play the part in the retelling.  They LOVED this, especially if they were Foxy Loxy!

We have also been talking about our Story Hand in Writer's Workshop.  Students have been working on writing personal narratives.  We talked about how each story needs to have a character, a setting and three events (beginning, middle and end).  Our Kindergartners had all kinds of stories to share!  Some students wrote stories about falling off bunk beds, breaking bones or vacations they took.  We interwove this into our Reader's Workshop by going more in depth on characters.  We talked about how characters can be a person, an animal of a thing (i.e. a snowman).  We also talked about characters use dialogue and we can tell when a character is speaking by the quotation marks.  We practiced changing our voices to match the characters when we retold the story of Chicken Little!

Goldilocks and the Three....???

Over the last couple of weeks, we have been reading various versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  Students got REALLY excited about this story and we used to hit many skills!  One of our main focuses was to practice retelling familiar stories.  Over a period of several days, we read almost ten different versions of Goldilocks, including Goldilocks and the Three Hares.  We practiced retelling it by using key words such as "first", "then", "next" and "last".  We talked about the beginning, the middle and the end of the story.  We also compared each version to see if they were the same or different.  Students were SO excited about it that they decided they wanted to write their own versions!  So, today, we finally began working on our own books!  Some titles include Goldilocks and the Three Princesses, Goldilocks and the Three Cows, and Goldilocks and the Three Sharks.  I can't wait to read the finished products!