Where The Wild Things Are

Happy Halloween to everyone today!  It's going to be a fun and crazy day!

Tammy,  at Forever in 1st and Andrea, at Reading Toward the Stars have both booed me!  You MUST go to their very fine blogs and visit them.

One of the rules of being booed is to share some October activities or books that you have been using in class this month.  On Tuesday, with Halloween almost here, I read them Where the Wild Things Are.  

This book is a favorite with kids everywhere of course!  Mine were no different.  We roared our terrible roars, gnashed our terrible teeth, rolled our terrible eyes and showed our terrible claws!  Fun times!  

We had just finished up an author study on Normal Bridwell of the always fun Clifford books.  These kids knew these books inside and out and how they were alike and different.

After reading Where the Wild  Things Are, we had a conversation about how this book was alike and different from the Clifford books.  At first glance you might think that these books would make a strange pairing for compare and contrast, but the kids got so into it and were able to think deeply about them and not come up with surface level comparisons.

Almost immediately the kids thought of that there was one person who did both jobs of author/illustrator and that both Clifford and Max had bad habits.  I love watching and listening to these kids think!

For my older students, I read them The Great Pumpkin Switch.  This books sparks GREAT conversations about what students would do if they found themselves in the same situation as the boys in the story.  The boys accidently  smash the girl's pumpkin that she is growing and switch it out with another pumpkin that she didn't grow.  We talked about if it was right for them to not tell her and switch it.  On one hand if they tell, she will probably cry but they will be being honest.  If they don't tell, she doesn't cry but will gets rewards for a pumpkin she didn't grow.  We discussed both sides and voted.  Second graders mostly said they would be honest even if it made her cry.  My third graders (which happened to be all boys) and some second graders thought differently.  They did not want to make the girl cry so there was no way they were telling even if it was a bit dishonest.  I enjoy having these deep conversations with students and gaining their perspective on how they see the world!