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Shared Reading - Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

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Shared Reading - Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

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The Sounds Around Town by Maria Cariuccio

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Sign up for free at the bottom of the page

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A couple of years ago, and I wrote a collection of guided reading books to go with the Who's Doing the Work? K-2 Lesson Sets (Stenhouse, 2018). Carnegie Learning has graciously agreed to let me share the fiction titles from this collection with you, here on this site.

There are 15 titles ranging from Level A to Level J. I have built flipbooks with each title, and embedded them here on the site. The text below, one of my favorite in the collection, is an example of the set-up for each book, and will show you how the flipbooks in the collection work. Missing Socks, like all the books in the collection, includes illustrations designed to engage students and deepen the story.
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Mindfulness:
​There are three titles in the collection that relate to mindfulness. Happy (Level C) is about a little girl who is exploring different kinds of happiness, such as the calm happiness of a breeze vs. the palpable happiness of a surprise birthday party. Hurry Up, Slow Down (Level D) is about a little girl who is walking to school with her father and is caught up in the simple beauty around her. Finally, Everyday Beautiful (Level H) is about two boys who have been asked to find something beautiful. One boy overlooks the natural beauty around him while another shows him how simple things can be beautiful.

There are five titles in the collection that use science related to light and shadows to tell a story. They range in levels from C-J. We wrote these to align with science standards. If you teach light and shadows, you may find these texts a nice way to integrate your science content into your reading instruction.

The books are all in flipbook format and are free to use and share with children, but they require a password to access them. To get the password, complete the form below. When you hit submit, a password will pop up on the screen. Use that password in step 2 (below) to access the books.

If you already have the these digital versions of some of the books should be helpful. Although you don't need the lessons to use the books, if you are interested in the lessons that go with the books, they are available from .

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Free Virtual Guided Reading Book Collection

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A couple of years ago, and I wrote a collection of guided reading books to go with the Who's Doing the Work? K-2 Lesson Sets (Stenhouse, 2018). Carnegie Learning has graciously agreed to let me share the fiction titles from this collection with you, here on this site.

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Flyleaf Publishing - Online Materials Portal

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For Students - Flyleaf Publishing - Online Materials Portal

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Article from Catching Readers...

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This past fall I attended a wonderful conference in Washington, DC. - the Children Are Citizens conference. While I left with much to think about and try in my classroom, the one thing I implemented immediately was storytelling. Georgina Ardalan, @georgina_in_dc, led an outstanding session on interactive storytelling. She shared a video with Ben Mardell using Vivian Paley's storytelling and story-acting approach, and then shared how she uses this in her pre-K classroom. Finally, the participants got to experience this fun interactive storytelling. It was amazing!

I took this back to my classroom and started it the next day. The process is simple, but I've found it to be extremely powerful and so much fun. It's definitely a favorite part of our day.

First, the storyteller thinks of a story. We have a storyteller each day and their name is on our calendar so they know when it's their day. I encourage them the day before to think about what their story might be. The storyteller tells their story to me, as the class listens. I write it down as they tell the story - on my clipboard, writing fast to keep up with the story. This is not a shared writing. The writing is just for me. Most stories at this point in kindergarten are 5-6 sentences long. After the story is told, I read it back to the storyteller - one sentence at a time, asking them if that's what they want it to say and making any revisions. The class listens and asks any questions or for clarifications they might need. This on-the-spot revising has been really wonderful in helping kids elaborate and use more details in their stories.

Next, we determine who the characters are, and what the setting is. We do this together. Then we decide what parts we need actors and actresses for. Often the kids want someone to play roles beyond the characters. For example, if a story takes place at the beach, someone will play the beach. If there's a toy or piece of furniture in the story, a child will pretend to be that. I let the kids decide what roles we need people to pretend to be. The storyteller then chooses whether they want to play a role in the story or if they want to be in the audience. Then the other roles are assigned to kids.

Next, we move to the space on the rug where the audience sits, and the actors and actresses get on the rug space that is the "stage". I give them a minute to talk and plan how they are going to play their roles, and then we start the story-acting! I read the story as the kids act it out. We usually have time to act out the story twice, with different kids playing the different roles, in our daily 15 minute storytelling time.

Through this daily storytelling, I've seen the kids have a much deeper understanding of and enjoyment with:

oral language and communicating with others in a clear way

community building through sharing stories that are important

characters and setting

beginning, middle and end

adding details to stories to help your reader or listener

revising to make a story clearer

adding dialogue to make a story even better

how to use movement and facial expressions to communicate an idea or feelings

listening and asking questions to understand a story better

listening and enjoying a performance - what is the role of the audience

creating stories on their own during Writers' Playshop (I always remind the storyteller that they can make a book of their story so that this story will live forever - many kids choose to do this.)

At the end of first quarter, we did an assessment of the books that children have written. Every single child in our classroom is able to write a 3-5 (or more) page book, on one topic, with a beginning, middle and end. Many of the books had details I would expect to see much later in the year such as, dialogue and more complex story lines, characters and settings. I think the daily storytelling has played a huge role in this. The transfer from the oral, interactive storytelling to the children's own writing is clearly evident. And the fun we have every day during this time is the best!

Below are two videos from storytelling in our classroom. Enjoy!

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This past fall I attended a wonderful conference in Washington, DC. - the Children Are Citizens conference. While I left with much to think about and try in my classroom, the one thing I implemented immediately was storytelling. Georgina Ardalan, @georgina_in_dc, led an outstanding session on interactive storytelling.

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Practical examples of Shared and Interactive Writing

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Conferring Toolkits: Class Stories, Shared Writing and Interactive Writing

I like to keep my writing toolkits pretty plain and simple. I don't want a lot of extraneous stuff in there cluttering up my folders. So, in order for something to make it into my toolkit, it has to be helpful for a lot of kids, for a lot of reasons.

That's why I find class stories, shared writing and interactive writing to be indispensable tools for conferring.

In case you aren't already familiar with the power of writing together, you can read an older post about shared writing, here. And another post about oral storytelling here. For even more, you should read Interactive Writing, by Andrea McCarrier, Gay Su Pinnell, and Irene Fountas.

Whether it's storytelling, or shared writing, or interactive writing, any piece of writing that your whole class created together is going to be extremely helpful to have at your fingertips while you are moving about the classroom conferring.

I used to do all my shared writing and interactive writing on very large chart paper, so that I could easily display it on the walls and kids would be able to read it from their spots around the room. I still do this-but I've been doing lots of shared and interactive writing lately using regular sized copy paper on a document camera. I can still tape the smaller pieces to a larger chart-sized paper to display the whole story-and I can make photocopies of the work to carry around with me more easily.

Here are a few ways that I use shared writing and interactive writing as part of my conferring toolkit:

Tip #1: When your whole class knows a story, you can easily pull it out during a conference to work on revision. For example, check out this story, written together with kindergarteners (they told me the words, I drew the pictures and wrote).

The original story needed some work, don't you think? In a conference with one child, I taught her about making a beginning that really sounds like storytelling. We used interactive writing: she wrote the word wall words for the new beginning, and I wrote the other words:

In later one-one conferences, the story wound up getting put in a different order, and a new ending was added. Copies of this story still live in my narrative conferring toolkit, and I use it often for adding labels, adding dialogue, and many other teaching points.

Tip #2: When the text is familiar, it makes a great piece to have kids add to or work on during a conference as practice with a new strategy, before transferring the strategy to their own writing.

In a first grade classroom, we started this poem as a group one very warm day in April (the heat in the building wouldn't turn off even though it was 70 degrees outside!).

Then, when I taught a small group that they could use repetition, we did this:

Of course, none of the kids were writing about being hot in their own poems-that is certainly not the point! No! But they did all work on using repetition and comparisons. I added both group poems to my poetry toolkit, to use with future kids - as great mentors for using comparisons, punctuation (or not), and repetition.

Tip #3: I often will manipulate the class writing to intentionally leave parts out, so that you can add those parts in conferring or small group work. Like in this persuasive letter that a group of third graders worked on (telling me their ideas, with me scribing:

Notice the ending is somewhat weak? That was intentional on my part. The kids told it to me that way, and I left it. I anticipated that endings/conclusions in persuasive writing would be something to focus later on in the unit, especially in small groups and conferring, so I decided not to write a strong ending the first time around. I made copies of the letter and stuck them in my conferring toolkit so that whenever I meet with a kid or two and want to teach different ways to write endings/conclusions, we could practice on this letter.

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Don't forget to stay with us all week long as we share what's inside our conferring toolkits!

On Monday, May 11, we hope you'll join us for our twitter chat. Just use #TWTBlog to participate in the conversation!

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Conferring Toolkits: Class Stories, Shared Writing and Interactive Writing

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I like to keep my writing toolkits pretty plain and simple. I don't want a lot of extraneous stuff in there cluttering up my folders. So, in order for something to make it into my toolkit, it has to be helpful for a lot of kids, for a lot of reasons.

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MAKE A COPY FIRST

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Compliment and then teach! Get quick way to make sure you let the student know what they are doing well and what they can work on.

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Remembering to always complement the child for their work before adding a teaching point

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What I noticed and then where to take them next

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Looking at student writing samples and collaborating to think of next steps

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loved the pictures as ideas for shared writing

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loved the pictures as ideas for shared writing

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Tasting the Consonants Chart with Visuals

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Tasting the Consonants Chart with Visuals