Scaredy Squirrel Goes Camping

Last fall I discovered Scaredy Squirrel and I love the books.  (The kids in my class were WAY ahead of me...they know all about him!)
I read Scaredy Squirrel Goes Camping (by Melanie Watt) to them. It was just recently published at the time, and none of them had read it yet.

Scaredy Squirrel is so popular that we already had 4 out of five of the books in our school library and I have recently found them on Epic! (if you don't have this app yet you MUST check it out.  I blogged about it HERE).  They are also on Just Books Read Aloud, another free reading app that I recently found.  Listening to books and reading on apps is fantastically popular in my classroom.  Even the more reluctant readers love getting the chance to do these centers.

I made a set of activities to accompany Scaredy Squirrel Goes Camping and my class completed several of them when we finished reading the book together.  The full product is available at Teachers Pay Teachers, but I have made a preview freebie that includes 3 of the 10 activities included in the full package.  The link for the freebie is at the end of the post.

The first is a craftivity Emergency kit.  Scaredy Squirrel is always prepared for disasters that he is sure are about to befall him!

  

I adapted the emergency kit idea from Jennifer's Teaching Tools which you can find here.

The second activity is an interview sheet.  Students make up questions they would ask Scaredy if they were a reporter, and then answer as if they were Scaredy.

The third is a sheet that I always keep in my Listening Center for kids to complete when they have finished listening to a book.  It is called Making Connections and requires students to make either a Text to Text, Text to Self, or Text to World connection, write about what happened in the story, and explain what it reminded them of.

I hope you enjoy using these in your classroom.  Get the freebie  HERE, then check out more of this week's freebies at Teaching Blog Addict. 

Sunday Poetry Slam

This is my very first blog post and I'm pretty nervous. I hope it works....please leave me a comment to let me know.....

This poem is from the CanTeach website which has a good collection of poetry for kids. I used it with my grade one and two kids during the last week of school this year. There was no author credited with writing the poem so if you know who penned it please let me know too.

I gave my kids a 3 x 3 bingo sheet with 9 choices of activities on it. They had to complete three. If I was more experienced I would include a freebie of the sheet here:

But the sheet is locked up at school.  On it there was a variety of choices including reading the poem to yourself then to a friend using several different voices (eg whisper, excited, squeaky - you get the drift), draw a picture of your favourite line of the poem then print the line under the picture and write a sentence telling why you chose it, write 2 new lines for the poem ending with beach and peach, park and dark, etc., use your 5 senses to tell about one of these lines:  It's eating outside, It's water to wade, It's a tree-swing ride, It's dew in the morn. The kids LOVED this activity and I was surprised how many chose writing activities, and how many asked if it would be okay to do more than three!         

Summer 

I love summer! Summer is hot.
It's sun and shade.
It's water to wade.
It's frogs and bugs. It's grass for rugs.
It's eating outside.                          
It's a tree-swing ride.                        
It's tomatoes and corn.
It's dew in the morn.
It's dogs and boys
And lots of noise.
It's a hot sunny sky.
It's summer. That's why.....
I love summer.