[MOSAIC] Charlotte's Web Visualization

[Deborah Devine]

Dear Group,
    I remember teaching with this text and creating Reader's Theatre Scripts from some of the chapters. So many of them can be typed almost exactly as written with the narrator part pulling it all together. What a happy memory as I VISUALIZE ALL THE ANIMALS TALKING TOGETHER, with my students in their very simple costume of sweatsuits with a pig's nose or such.  I remember my 4th graders practising so they spoke their lines with fluency. 
     To promote visualization skills, I had my students draw the old barn where Wilbur lived as I read about the barn. Then I gave them a copy of the text that I had read ,and they cut and pasted the exact words on their drawings that helped them form their picture. 
    I remember being part of the program, "Agriculture in the Classroom", and our farmer partner brought in a 2 week old lamb and a month old pig and talked about the care require to raise these animals.  One of the children asked what would happen to the animals when they were full grown.  "Meat on the hoof!" was the destiny for the little pig. One of the children in class refused to eat pork at home for the rest of the year!!!!
   That year, I found a Christmas ornament that was a glass web with a spider in the middle of the web and I bought one for each child in my class and one for me too.  I don't usually splurge like this, but the joy we shared just couldn't be forgotten. Each year as I put it on the tree,  the memories of a special class and a special book come flooding back. Isn't that the POWER OF WORDS...and isn't that the joy we want to share with our students. 
Happy reading,
Deborah Devine
-----Original Message-----
>From: Angela Almond <Angela_Almond at scs.k12.nc.us>
>Sent: Jan 13, 2007 6:22 PM
>To: "Mosaic: A Reading Comprehension Strategies Listserv" <mosaic at literacyworkshop.org>
>Subject: Re: [MOSAIC] teaching strategies
>
>My problem is not with the chapter fiction books because we don't focus on
>these as much during reading classes.  We focus more on teaching the
>strategies through non-fiction and then we model with fiction during read
>aloud and the kids practice during SSR when we conference with them.  The
>problem I am running into is the non-fiction articles and trade books that
>I had been using and stocked my classroom with are now being borrowed by
>the third grade teachers so that next year most of what I have been using
>for several years will not be able to be used.  I am all about using new
>material and each year I find better texts to use but there are some that
>are just hard to beat when trying to teach a difficult strategy.
>
>Angela Hatley Almond
>Fourth Grade
>East Albemarle Elementary School
>
>
>
>
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