If you’re not comprehending and understanding what you read, then you’re not really reading. This is why reading comprehension is so important. And that’s why we’ve made reading comprehension a major focus of our instruction using our Read It Up creations. Snowmen At Night and They Snowy Day are two of our favorite winter books so they make great tools for building our reading comprehension skills.
With Read It Up we’re providing students complex texts with the scaffolding and support to allow them to be successful. We’re building their oral and written comprehension skills with multiple opportunities to speak about the books and write in response to literature. Our Read It Up creations are interactive and involve the reader and the text, they are strategic and give readers a purpose and a variety of strategies to comprehend the text and they are adaptable so students can change strategies as they read and build comprehension!
Snowmen At Night: Comprehension
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Making predictions is a great way to engage readers and excite them about the book. We started Snowmen At Night by predicting what we think snowmen do at night. After we read the book we listed what the snowmen actually did!
Next, we sequenced the story using a flow map. As we made our flow map we are orally retelling the story. Then the students complete their own flow map!
Next, we brainstormed what we would do if we were snowmen at night and created a class chart of our ideas. This made a great turn and talk lesson where the kids shared their ideas with one another and built their oral language skills.
The students then did independent writing and drawing about what they would do if they were a snowman at night!
As part of our research based Read It Up creations, we always include a grammar lesson. The idea by including grammar is that we will see these grammar skills start showing up in our students writing.
For this story we focused on singular and plural nouns. We learned what singular and plural meant and sorted our nouns. As we sorted the nouns we had to explain why they were singular or plural.
Snowmen At Night Snack And Art
For our snowmen art project, we used paper squares to create a melted snowman because the snowman in the story melts a little from his night of fun!
And of course you need a snowman snack so we built a snowman with marshmallows and used icing pens to make the face!
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
Ezra Jack Keats is one of my favorite authors and The Snowy Day is a perfect winter book that we can all relate to!
One of our favorite activities was thinking of things we do on a snow day and things we don’t do on a snow day! This is a great activity to help students make those important text to self connections! This is also a great turn and talk activity to build oral language skills!
We also try to include a graphing or math activity in our Read It Up creations so we graphed our favorite snowy day activity!
The students also brainstormed what they would do on a snowy day and then they wrote about their snowy day adventures. (But Mr. Greg forgot to take pictures of the writing….oops!)
Get Them Both For Only $9
Shop the TKS Store, add Read It Up! Snowmen At Night and Read It Up! The Snowy Day to your cart. At checkout enter the code BOGO50, you’ll save 50% off one of them bringing your total from $12, to only $9!!
For more information on our Read It Up creations and reading comprehension instruction, visit this post:
