Reflecting and Reading!!

Greetings friends. I'm Crystal from Kreative in Kinder. Happy almost but feels like summer. J For those of you who teach in public school, I hope have begun your summer break. If I am completely honest, I still work much of the summer but the only children I wrangle daily are my own three and I can wear whatever and work whenever. For instance, right now I am typing this from a lake house we rented for the week for our vacation. Summer break, however long you have it, is a great time to take a step back, evaluate the good, bad, and ugly from the recently completed school year. I would love to write a book called The Ghosts of School Years Past. J It would definitely be an interesting read. J Reflection is my summer theme. I think that helps me start the school year refreshed and feeling prepared.  I am a “work in progress” friends.

This past Saturday, I met several other teacher bloggers and blog followers for a Texas meet up. If you follow many blogs, you are bound to find a meet up in your area. Go! Meet others who understand the craziness of your life and appreciate you for what you do. We laughed and laughed. It was a grand time!!  After dinner we made our way into a really neat country store. In true teacher form, we migrated to the wall where there were really cool Texas themed books and I found the book, There Was a Coyote Who Swallowed a Flea. Can I tell you how excited I was? SO EXCITED!!

This brings me to what I really planned on blogging about today. J I love books that carry the same literary theme. I have the There Was An Old Lady That Swallowed A Fly puppet that I use after reading the story to work on sequencing. 

Throughout the year, we read several similar books and my students immediately caught on to the structure of the text.  I love repetitive text. I find that my students are drawn to books like this.  They remember the sequence and can “read” it on their own. I LOVE that! If you haven’t checked out any of these books, you totally should.

I also like reading books that have different versions. We compare the characters, settings, problems, and solutions. At the beginning of the school year we read different versions of The Little Red Hen. This is a great book to compare for our young learners. Here are my favorites. 

 Have a great summer! Make time to reflect and renew. It’s going to be a great season.