Creepy Carrots

Raise your hand if you love the book Creepy Carrots!   Seriously, it’s a must read. I was introduced to the book about two years ago and it immediately became a classic!   I love it, the kids love it and it’s full of teaching possibilities.  Which is why I created a READ IT UP creation to use with the book!

A little background…

Have you seen our Read It Up Creations?  If not, I started creating these last year in response to a district mandate.  Without sharing too many of personal opinions on this matter (read between the lines, ya’ll)….our district purchased ($$$$$$$$) something called an IFL Unit.  IFL stands for Institute For Learning.  These literacy units are promoted as “exemplar” units for teaching literacy.  The units our district purchased were for Brave Irene and Dr. DeSoto.  As we started planning for these IFL units, we realized the approach was less than engaging and we questioned the developmentally appropriateness of the activities and teaching methods.     But I know my students are capable of anything as long as they have the necessary scaffolding and support.  And that is where the Read It Up series of creations was born.  We took a district mandate and made it appropriate and engaging for our students.

And I’ll leave you with this….at the end of the IFL units on Brave Irene and Dr. DeSoto (remember…EXEMPLAR units)…my class had knocked it out of the park.  They could discuss personification and compare and contrast stories.  They were writing about character traits.  Exemplar.

Read It Up:  Creepy Carrots

One of the areas that my students struggle with is reading comprehension.  Part of this is a language barrier because a majority of my students speak little to no English.  Recognizing this weakness in my teaching and my students learning,  I wanted something that would really allow us to focus on comprehension.  That’s what Read It Up does!  It focuses on retelling, story maps, sequencing, vocabulary (HUGE FOR MY KIDS!), and story specific literacy skills such as problem/solution, compare/contrast, etc.  Using this has already greatly improved our comprehension of stories and books!

For Creepy Carrots, we focused on retelling the story using sequence words based on data and anecdotal notes from guided reading!

After reading the story, the class had to retell me the story with details including characters and settings.  I recorded their retelling.

After we made the chart, we orally retold the story using the sequencing words.

Then the students had to use the retelling page to retell the story using drawings!  After finishing their drawings, they had to again retell the story for me.  This served as a great assessment!

Creepy Carrots:  Math

Because we were celebrating an entire CREEPY CARROTS DAY we also pulled in some math skills after reading the story.  We graphed our feelings on carrots:  creepy or yummy!

After we did our class graph, the students did their own graph and analyzed the data!

Creepy Carrots:  STEM

Since Jasper had a problem with the carrots getting out of the field and the carrots had a problem with Jasper getting into the field, we decided to build a fence to keep our carrots in the field!  We used possible sticks and tape and a plastic egg for our STEM project!

Creepy Carrots:  Art

Of course, you can’t read Creepy Carrots and not make your own creepy carrots!

And….if you are reading Creepy Carrots….you MUST dress up as a Carrot!  My costume is from Amazon!

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