Winter and January have some of our favorite winter read-alouds, such as Snowmen At Night, Tacky The Penguin, Snowy Day, and Bear Snores On! These books are great for winter reading comprehension lessons! Keep reading to see some of our best January reading comprehension ideas!
Winter Reading Comprehension: Snowman At Night
Making predictions is a great way to engage readers and excite them about the book. It’s also a great way to help students monitor their understanding of the story. The predictions help students focus on what’s happening in the story. 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 sequence the story using pictures. As we sequence the story, we orally retelling it. The kids talk, use transition words, and build language skills.
Next, we brainstormed what we would do if we were snowmen at night and created a graphic organizer 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 science of reading-aligned Read It Up creations, we include a grammar lesson. The idea of 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.
January Reading Comprehension: Art And Snack Ideas
For our snowman 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!
Winter Reading Comprehension: The Snowy Day
Ezra Jack Keats is one of my favorite authors, and The Snowy Day is a perfect winter book for us all to 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!
Students also sort activities we can and cannot do on snowy days!
We also include a graphing activity in our Read It Up creations, so we graphed our favorite snowy day activity! These graphing resources also help build language skills. Students have to share their vote, maybe why it’s their favorite, etc.
Tacky The Penguin
Another favorite is Tacky The Penguin! I love this book because it encourages kids to be themselves and not conform to what others want or think. We are all about being unique and standing out, so this is a must-read book!
We start with predictions,, and then, after reading the book, we discuss what actually happens. Making predictions is a great comprehension strategy because it helps students monitor their comprehension. By making predictions, they’re focusing more on the story!
We also discuss what Tacky sees, does, feels and thinks. We use this as a turn-and-talk activity. Students turn and talk about what Tacky does. Then they share out!
Finally, students use a variety of art materials to design a shirt for Tacky! They can then write about their design and share it with the class to build oral language skills.
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