Read-Along Story Time for Beginning Readers (Letter L), 8/7/13
Attendees
This story time was not attended by most of the regulars, but it was still a good-sized group. Three of the kids were definite beginning readers; the others were mostly preschoolers of varying ages. They were a much quieter group than usual, and there were about 7 kids in all.
iPad Presentation
I didn't write out sentences for my letter L images this week, and that worked out fine, since most of the kids were pretty young. They seemed to enjoy calling out the names of the different objects, and it broke the ice well enough to make them comfortable participating in the rest of the session. The images included: lamb, lion, licorice, library (which was a photo of our library), light bulb, ladybug, lettuce, Abraham Lincoln, lobster, leaves, and little old lady.
Read-Along
I have been wanting to use Maurice Sendak's Pierre for a long time, and when I decided on L as my letter, I thought the lion in the story would tie in nicely. To make the reading of this story interactive, I created a speech bubble which said, "I don't care!" and I help it up for the kids to read each time Pierre said he didn't care. The kids were not as into this as I thought they would be, but I think that had more to do with their being new to the story time than anything else.
Read-Aloud
We acted out The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything. Since this was a quieter group than I'm used to, it was not the boisterous activity I was expecting, but they still seemed to enjoy it. I did catch a mom rolling her eyes toward the end when we were repeating the same set of actions for the tenth time, but her son didn't seem to share her annoyance.
Literacy Game
We played a matching game where the kids had to tell me whether words did or did not start with the same sound. If the beginning sounds were the same, we put down a lit-up light bulb. If they were not the same, we put down a dim lightbulb. We repeated the game with two variations. The second time we looked for matching ending sounds, and the third time, we listened for rhyming words. This was such a favorite, I wished I'd planned a few more rounds.
Write and Draw Activity
I re-used the bookshelf activity from my Read-Along Story Time on April 11. I changed the original handout title from, "______'s Bookshelf" to "_________'s Library and invited the kids to draw the covers or write the names of the kinds of books they liked reading. The three oldest kids got into it; the others just colored.
