Thursday, March 26, 2015

Meet the Bunnies

Read & Respond
I was going to add this to a post tomorrow but I couldn't wait. We have been having a great time with our new format in reading groups. We still use mini-readers along with our school's Treasures and F&P readers, but we've added in Read & Respond texts. I've posted 2 units so far (March and April). 

They are fiction and non-fiction texts. Each text has a short text along with questions. The questions can have picture and/or written answers. Some of the texts have pictures above specific vocabulary, some have vocabulary boxes and some we have drawn pictures on the text. 
3 of the texts in the Read & Respond April unit are about the Bunny family. I've posted a freebie with 2 of the Bunny texts. 
Here students are working on The Bunnies Make Paint. First, we looked at the vocabulary. How were these things alike? Then we thought about the vocabulary and the title together to predict. We found the color words, vocabulary, and read the story. Then we answered the questions. The last paint he made was brown because chocolate is brown. We looked back in the text to sequence the colors the bunnies made. It is in the sampler.
We read this text today. We loved visualizing the bunnies. What did Funny, Sunny & Honey look like? What was rainbow water? Then, I had an oh-uh moment. When we got to the question on fantasy/reality, the Easter Bunny came up. So, our class read Corduroy's Easter Party which has great hidden details in the pictures. 

Corduroy isn't sure about the Easter Bunny. On each page a small brown rabbit is hiding and at the end, Corduroy gets a basket and note from the Easter Bunny. All was well.
Nonetheless...I changed the text in April pack and added another version. We had such fun visualizing that I added Meet the Bunny Family to the April pack. You can get The Bunnies Make Paint and The Bunnies Get Ready in the free sampler.

     The March packet has some great pieces on weather that we really loved including Cloud Pictures and these that I posted on my Facebook page.