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Bellwether publishers will quickly become a favorite of 2nd and 3rd graders studying simple machines. These Level 4 Blastoff Readers contain full color images, labeled diagrams, captions, bold vocabulary words, fun facts, a glossary, and websites to learn more information. These books are perfect for reinforcing the use of text features and research skills. Titles offered on Big Universe include:
One of my favorite stories involving simple machines is The 3 Pigs and the Scientific Wolf by Mary Fetzner. In the past, I’ve rewritten the book as a reader’s theater script and had the students create masks and costumes to act it out. This story is perfect for demonstrating the use of simple machines with an added bonus of humor.
Here are a couple of lessons using this book (Lessons can be modified for younger students):
Machines and Work Across the Ages (Grades 6-8)
Solving Problems Using Simple Machines (Grade 5)
Keisa Williams (aka Ms. K) is a K-5 School Librarian at Monarch Academy, a public charter school in Oakland, CA. She is certified in secondary and elementary education (MLIS and MEd) and loves collaborating with teachers and integrating technology into her teaching. She considers herself a “Technology Diva” and “Gadget Junkie”.
It is back to school already!?!? I think most of us are wondering what happened to summer break; I know I am. Break time is over with and it is back to the books and I know that there are probably many households that are “refreshing” their reading skills. We did slack off a bit during the summertime in our reading, which I really did not intend to do, so we are going to have to play catch-up to get back on track.
My oldest son is in the 2nd grade this year and, from the words of his mouth, he says “Second grade is hard; it is only for smart people.” I have to chuckle every time he says that. The biggest challenge that our household faced last year was in reading. I have searched for ways to help to make reading a bit easier and here are some things that I have found:
a. Consistency, consistency, consistency. Did I mention consistency? Yes, I feel that is the most important aspect. When you do things in repetition, you tend to finally “get” things after a certain time period – everything just “clicks”. So, I am determined to spend a certain amount of time, on a daily basis, with my child to go over the basics until he grows tired and weary, and can recite what was set out to be learned.
b. Make learning fun. Find a character that your child enjoys and make use of that character. Spice up the routine every now and then so the “routine” does not become so routine.
c. Progress and reward chart. Your child is just like you are – loves to see progress. Make a chart at where they are starting from to where they want to go. You will be amazed at how excited they can become once they see that they are progressing, and what a better way to celebrate their progress than with a reward? Now, the reward does not have to be anything extravagant, maybe take them out to an ice cream treat or to see a movie that they have been wanting to see. It will make them feel special and, most of all, it will make them feel proud of themselves.
The vitality of mastering early reading and comprehension skills is so crucial to our children’s future. Reading IS their future. So, whatever steps that we, as parents, need to take to ensure the best possible learning in literacy for our children, we need to take. Reading may be their future but our children are our future.
Keisa Williams (aka Ms. K) is a K-5 School Librarian at Monarch Academy, a public charter school in Oakland, CA. She is certified in secondary and elementary education (MLIS and MEd) and loves collaborating with teachers and integrating technology into her library lessons. She considers herself a “Technology Diva” and “Gadget Junkie”.
The Lion & The Mouse by Jerry Pinkney
Wordless picture books are a great way to encourage reluctant readers, motivate storytelling, and prompt creative writing. I was blessed to receive the Caldecott Medal winning book, The Lion & The Mouse by Jerry Pinkney from a Twitter Elementary Librarian colleague, Ernie Cox. It was serendipitous that our kindergarten and first grade teams had just read another version of this story to our students.
When I introduced this book to students, I talked about how the illustrations in most picture books tell the story. I then modeled how to “read” a wordless picture book. I narrated parts and I added dialogue where appropriate. For example, “As the lion squeezed his paws around the mouse, the mouse screamed, “HELP!”…But no one heard his cries.” During the second reading, I call on students to “read” each page. When they narrate, I encourage them to think about describing how a character feels (and why), body language, the setting, and encourage them to add dialogue to enhance their storytelling. They always surprise me with the humor and specific details they choose to add to the story.
Did you know that Big Universe has wordless picture books? Use these titles to get your little ones “reading”:
Wordless picture books on Big Universe
Ben's Big Dig on Big Universe
Ben's Bunny Trouble on Big Universe
Maggie Cary, a national board certified teacher has been an educator for more than 17 years. She is certified in secondary education and holds a master’s degree in early childhood education.
Over the years she has mentored countless teachers and advised hundreds of parents. Cary has taught children from preschool through high school. She also offers classroom advice on website Classroom Talk.
You can take advantage of the extra time you’ll have with your child this summer by incorporating reading games into your everyday activities. These times when you can help your child practice reading and writing are Golden Opportunities. Here are 10 ways to make sure you don’t miss out.
- When waiting for a meal in a restaurant, ask your child to read items on the menu.
- When waiting at the ice cream shop, have your child try to read all the ice cream flavors. To mix things up you could ask them to read to themselves and then tell you all the flavors that include chocolate or a type of fruit.
- On a car trip, a great way to pass the time is to read bumper stickers and the sides of panel trucks. See who can be the first one to spot a specific word or letter.
- If you go to a theme park or zoo this summer, let your child be your “tour guide.” Depending on age and reading level, your child can read signs or the full descriptions from books and brochures.
- Let your child write a list of things to take on vacation. They can then check off the items on their list as they pack.
- Similarly, your child can make a summer activity to-do list. Let them post it on the refrigerator and make tally marks of the number of times they did particular things at the end of the day.
- Summer is the perfect time to make cool collections of things you find outdoors—bugs, rocks, flowers, etc.—and make custom labels. Older kids can look up the objects in their collection in library books, while younger kids can fill out their labels with simple descriptions.
- As a family, send post cards to friends and relatives even if you don’t leave town.
- A new notebook can serve a number of purposes for your child: a diary or travel journal, a field notebook or collection of short stories.
- Start a scrapbook with pictures and captions of summer fun.
While Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement
was written to assist teachers in the classroom,7 Keys to Comprehension: How to Help Your Kids Read It and Get It!
is written in a fashion that guides parents as they teach their children comprehension strategies.
If children don’t understand what they read, they will never embrace reading. And that limits what they can learn while in school. 7 Keys to Comprehension: How to Help Your Kids Read It and Get It! is the result of cutting-edge research. It gives parents practical, thoughtful advice about the seven simple thinking strategies that proficient readers use:
• Connecting reading to their background knowledge
• Creating sensory images
• Asking questions
• Drawing inferences
• Determining what’s important
• Synthesizing ideas
• Solving problems
Easily understood, easily applied, and proven successful, this essential educational tool helps parents to turn reading into a fun and rewarding experience.
Dawn Little (aka Links to Literacy) also blogs at www.teachingwithpicturebooks.wordpress.com where she provides educators with picture book lessons based on comprehension strategies and the Six Traits of Writing. In addition, she blogs at www.literacytoolbox.wordpress.com where she provides educators and parents with tips and tools to enhance the literacy lives of children. She is the founder and owner of Links to Literacy, a company dedicated to providing interactive literacy experiences for children and families. Find out more at www.linkstoliteracy.com
Sorting is one of my favorite activities to do with young people in the library at the beginning of the school year. It encourages scientific and critical thinking and it’s a great way to reinforce the concepts of the Dewey Decimal system. Each year I place piles of different types of books on the library tables and my only instruction to students is to work together to “sort the books.” I give them 2 minutes to sort the books and then I ask for a group member to share how they sorted the books and why. Most of my younger students will sort according to color and size. The older students are more sophisticated and tend to sort by subject. I repeat this procedure until we have completed 3-4 cycles of sorting. By this time, it becomes challenging to figure out new ways to sort the books…but this is where their creativity comes to play. Try this activity with your little ones and see what they come up with.
This Big Universe title, Sort it Out!, by Barbara Mariconda is a perfect book to read just before the sorting activity. 
Keisa Williams (aka Ms. K) is a K-5 School Librarian at Monarch Academy, a public charter school in Oakland, CA. She is certified in secondary and elementary education (MLIS and MEd) and loves collaborating with teachers and integrating technology into her library lessons. She considers herself a “Technology Diva” and “Gadget Junkie”.
Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement is a book that was suggested to me early in my teaching career. I used it extensively in the classroom, and continue to use the resources and strategies within the book when I read to my own children. The goal is to create engaged, thoughtful, independent readers and this book helps!
Though Strategies That Work: Teaching Comprehension for Understanding and Engagement is meant as a resource for teachers, I feel that any parent who has an interest in explicitly teaching their children strategies when reading (especially parents who home school!), will find this book useful.
In this revised and expanded edition, Harvey and Goudvis have added twenty completely new comprehension lessons.
In this book, you will find:
- what comprehension is and how to teach it
- lessons and practices for teaching comprehension
- information on social studies and science reading, topic study research, textbook reading and the genre of test reading
- updated appendix section recommends a rich diet of fiction and nonfiction, short text, kid’s magazines, websites and journals
When kids are engaged in their reading they enhance their understanding, acquire knowledge, and learn from and remember what they read. And most importantly, they will want to read more!
Dawn Little (aka Links to Literacy) also blogs at www.teachingwithpicturebooks.wordpress.com where she provides educators with picture book lessons based on comprehension strategies and the Six Traits of Writing. In addition, she blogs at www.literacytoolbox.wordpress.com where she provides educators and parents with tips and tools to enhance the literacy lives of children. She is the founder and owner of Links to Literacy, a company dedicated to providing interactive literacy experiences for children and families. Find out more at www.linkstoliteracy.com
This post is inspired by Dawn Little’s (AKA Links to Literacy) Book Buddies blog post where she explained the benefits of pairing fiction and nonfiction readings to increase comprehension and engagement, and to increase background knowledge about a subject. Unfortunately, most of our home, classroom, and school library book collections are limited. The public library is always an option, but there are times when you aren’t able to make the trip to the library. Why not utilize the Big Universe website for your fiction and nonfiction pairings? There are hundreds of books to choose from!
Just search for your topic using the Search bar:
Screenshot of The Big Universe Search Box
-or- Browse the different categories:
Screenshot of the Category option
Leave a comment for other pairings that you discover on the Big University website.
Here are a few to get you started:
Bears
Sea Turtles
Birds
Bats
Keisa Williams (aka Ms. K) is a K-5 School Librarian at Monarch Academy, a public charter school in Oakland, CA. She is certified in secondary and elementary education (MLIS and MEd) and loves collaborating with teachers and integrating technology into her library lessons. She considers herself a “Technology Diva” and “Gadget Junkie”.
Written by an educator and librarian,How to Get Your Child to Love Reading: For Ravenous and Reluctant Readers Alike
is a 500+ page guide for parents! Codell provides activities, ideas, and inspiration for exploring everything in the world through books. Codell, resists grouping books by age level. Instead, she offers a simple method for determining whether a book is too difficult while pointing out that kids may listen on a much higher level than they read. She offers scores of thematic book lists parents can use to inspire young readers, ranging from topics as diverse as medieval England to dinosaurs or hiccups.
Inside this fantastic resource, you will find:
- Over 3,000 hand-picked titles on every subject under the sun
- Hundreds of child-tested, teacher-approved craft ideas, storytimes, book-based parties, mad-scientist experiments, cooking forays, web-site recommendations, and reading-club activities
- Reassuring and simple approaches to reading aloud with children from birthday through eighth grade
- Support for parents of reluctant readers and enriching ideas for eager readers
- Extensive indexes for locating books by subject, author, and title
- Suggestions for volunteer activities and for getting involved in your child’s school
- Easy access to award-winning books
- Exciting ways to reward reading progress
This book is an indispensible resource for all parents who want to engage their children in reading. And like Jim Trelease before her, Codell also has her own website where she continues to share information on reading for parents, educators, and librarians.
Dawn Little (aka Links to Literacy) also blogs at www.teachingwithpicturebooks.wordpress.com where she provides educators with picture book lessons based on comprehension strategies and the Six Traits of Writing. In addition, she blogs at www.literacytoolbox.wordpress.com where she provides educators and parents with tips and tools to enhance the literacy lives of children. She is the founder and owner of Links to Literacy, a company dedicated to providing interactive literacy experiences for children and families. Find out more at www.linkstoliteracy.com
Title: Jeffrey and the Sloth
Author: Kari-Lynn Winters
Illustrator: Ben Hodson
Published: 2007 Orca Book Publishing
ISBN: 978-1-55143-974-7
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? I find myself afflicted with this often. In the book, Jeffrey and the Sloth, Jeffrey accidentally stumbles upon a way to combat his writer’s block through doodling. With just a glance at the title page, students will immediately relate to Jeffrey. You see him standing in the doorway of his room staring at a blank sheet of paper on his desk. The defeated look on his face says it all. Instead of writing, Jeffrey begins to doodle and his doodle comes to life!
Use this book to inspire creative writing in elementary students. Give each student a blank sheet of paper and ask them to create their own doodle (making sure that they create at least 1 character in the doodle). Once the doodle is created, have students exchange papers and write a first person narrative as the doodle. Use the following questions as a guide:
- What is your name?
- Do you have a nickname? How did you get it? Be specific.
- Where are you from?
- Where do you live? Describe it. Is it messy, neat, what kinds of things are there?
- What is your favorite thing to do. Why?
- If you could ask the artist to change one thing about you, what would you change and why?
If you want to know more about this book or how the author conquered her own writer’s block, visit Kari-Lynn Winters’ website.
Keisa Williams (aka Ms. K) is a K-5 School Librarian at Monarch Academy, a public charter school in Oakland, CA. She is certified in secondary and elementary education (MLIS and MEd) and loves collaborating with teachers and integrating technology into her library lessons. She considers herself a “Technology Diva” and “Gadget Junkie”.
