As most, if not all, of us know, March is National Reading Month in the United States. Of course every day is reading day in our classrooms, but this month we get to put an extra bit of emphasis on the skill. Anyone who’s been around my site much knows that I love to be as cross-curricular as possible and always strive to include multiple skills in my lessons. This year I’d like to put a special spotlight on how I combine reading practice with money vocabulary and skills.

It used to be obvious, if someone moves to a new country, that person will need to learn the currency of that country as quickly as possible. The fact that we use credit/debit cards for virtually everything these days may have lessened the urgency of acquiring this skill, but it is still an important one to master. We do a lot of different activities to practice the names and values of different U.S.A. coins and bills (such as Eggcellent Activities: Coin Eggs), but today I’d like to specifically focus in on some of our favorite pieces of literature about the subject. The first two books were part of my post entitled Picture Books…In Math? but are so good they deserve a second look. The last, a Shel Silverstein poem, is a nice quick activity that can be slotted in when you have an extra few minutes.

Alexander Who Used to be Rich Last Sunday

The Alexander books by Judith Voirst are some of my all-time favorites! When we work with this book, I usually read straight through it, showing the pictures, and allowing students to simply enjoy the story the first time. After that, we do various activities including using play money to follow along with Alexander’s adventures, keeping a running total as we read, and even writing our own word problems based on the story.

The Berenstain Bears’ Trouble with Money

The Berenstain Bears is a classic series I remember my parents reading me as a child. Stan and Jan Berenstain’s stories always impart good lessons in a fun way. When using children’s literature with my older learners, especially my adults, I always encourage them to learn from the book themselves but also to go home and read the books to their children as well. It empowers my students to be part of their children’s English education, which is important as many of my students feel guilty about not being able to help their children in this way. This particular book doesn’t have specific amounts of money to follow along with, so I use it for general comprehension and discussion of idioms and common phrases related to money.

“Smart” from Where the Sidewalk Ends

Who doesn’t love a good Shel Silverstein poem? My students love them, they even make the final exam in pronunciation class a little more fun! This particular poem is another good opportunity to practice the names and values of different U.S.A. coins and keep a running total as you read. It’s also a great way to compare and contrast, seeing how a larger number of coins doesn’t necessarily result in a larger value of coins. The text is short enough that we can complete the activity in just a few minutes, making it a perfect way to start or end a larger lesson on the topic.

One thing I try to always do when using literature to teach anything is make sure every student has his/her own copy of the book/text. I do use my document camera to display it on the screen, but I like students being able to hold the book themselves. Sometimes it’s not possible to have enough copies for every student, but I strive to have no fewer than one copy for every two students. I find this enhances the lessons and makes it easier for students to complete activities. Happy teaching, everyone!

Here are some of our favorite U.S.A Coin practice activities that don’t involve specific texts:

Or you can save by purchasing a bundle of resources:

Monday is World Poetry Day, and one of my all time favorite poets is Shel Silverstein! My students, whether they are 5 or 88 (I actually had a student who was 88 once!), love his poetry as well. Whether it be an anthology such as Falling Up, or a stand alone book such as The Missing Piece, Shel Silverstein’s books never fail to put a smile on everyone’s face, and often make us think a little deeper as well. Here are just a few of the ways I use Mr. Silverstein’s poems in my classrooms.

Giraffe and a Half

Paper Version

Digital Version

To be honest, the rhyming word that I most associate with giraffe is laugh, which I always do when I read Giraffe and a Half. Sometimes I will read this with my students just for the fun of it, but the school day has become so packed that we hardly have time to do that anymore, so more often then not this book gets read when we are working on rhyming words. Most, but not all, of the rhyming pairs in this book match in spelling as well as sound. This makes it a little easier for my students, but there are still a few that cannot be paired by spelling alone which, as I mentioned a couple weeks ago in my post about There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly, is an important skill to practice (my older learners are especially prone to match based on spelling, rather than sound, for rhyming words). Since I don’t want to, “ruin the book” (to quote a former student), I keep this particular exercise short and sweet. I have cards with the various rhyming words on them (with a picture for each word to help with vocabulary acquisition for my ELLs and reading for my pre-literate and early literacy students). The students match up the rhyming pairs by putting the cards next to one another. I have a digital version as well where they drag and drop the words next to one another to form rhyming pairs.

The Giving Tree

Paper Version

Digital Version

One of my favorite Shel Silverstein stand alone books to use with older students is The Giving Tree. There are so many different things to focus on with this book, but my two main go-to’s tend to be sequencing and personification. Teaching older beginner ELLs, it’s always a challenge to find texts they can comprehend but aren’t too “babyish” when practicing foundational skills. Out of the various sentence sequencing activities we do, this one is always a favorite of my older learners, especially my adult students. They appreciate the mature messages of the book regarding changes we go through in life, sacrifice for people we love, and gratitude (or lack thereof). We often read picture books together, and they enjoy them, but this particular picture book feels as though it was written for adults. The other major skill I typically try to tackle with this book is personification, something that is often difficult for my students to truly grasp. The personification of the tree is very clear and my students are really able to understand what it is and how to identify it. After seeing it in this book, they are much better at identifying it in other texts and using it in their own writing.

Pronunciation Practice

Next semester I’m going to use Shel Silverstein’s poems in a new way (at least for me). For the first time ever I am teaching a class that is 100% focused on pronunciation. One of the ways we’ll be practicing our pronunciation, and evaluating one another’s efforts, is through the reading of poetry. I knew I wanted fun, short poems that my adult students would enjoy. I also wanted poems with strong a rhythm and a clear stress pattern for them to read. All of the poems we’ll be using, both for practice and evaluation, are going to be from Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic. I’m hoping next semester’s students will enjoy them as much as I, and my previous students, have.

Conclusion

Whether or not Mr. Silverstein’s poems are part of your celebrations, I hope you will do something fun with your students for World Poetry Day on Monday! I know I’ll be sharing at least a couple of Shel Silverstein’s poems with my level 1 grammar and speaking classes; I’m just having a hard time choosing which ones! Happy teaching, everyone.

It’s National Reading Month in the USA! My students and I love reading books together, especially picture books. I’ve shared several posts about how we use children’s literature in our classes in the past; here’s a quick list if you missed any:

• Picture Books for Older Learners
• Children’s Literature Based Activities for All Skill Levels (Dr. Seuss)
• Sequencing Sentences (The Giving Tree, Very Hungry Caterpillar, Miss Nelson is Missing)
• National Talk Like a Pirate Day (How I Became A Pirate)
• Cause & Effect, Part 2 (The Day Jimmy’s Boa Ate the Wash)
• A Grinchy Christmas, Part 1 (How the Grinch Stole Christmas)
• The Know-Nothings Talk Turkey

These books are all great, but today I’d like to focus on one of our all time favorites (I know, I say that every time), There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly. This is one of my favorite books to use, especially with beginning proficiency students, and it is always a hit–whether with elementary, middle school, high school, or adults. There’s just something about this book that tickles everyone’s funny bone and even the most stoic of students are smiling and chuckling by the end. There are several different ways we interact with this book, and I’ll try to give you a quick run down of them all.

Trash Can Old Lady

I first saw this activity on The Thoughtful Spot Day Care blog in a 2012 post. It is a great whole class review activity using a flip lid trash can as the old lady. The pieces were easy to gather and put together, but it is one of the more expensive activities that I have (hence I use it whole class rather than small group). To make your own trash can old lady, you’ll need a few supplies:

• a flip lid trash can
• something for hair (I used the end of a rope mop)
• a hat (to hide the mess you make attaching the “hair”)
• googly eyes
• a glue gun

Remove the mop from the handle and glue it on top of the trash can. Be careful not to impede the movement of the lid any more than absolutely necessary. Trim the “hair” the way you like it (I trimmed the front to form bangs). Then glue the hat on top to cover up the mess of the glue and “hair.” Finally, attach a couple of eyes to the moving part of the flip lid. Your old lady is now ready for action, and all that remains is to gather toy versions of each animal (the fly is the hardest). It’s been a few years since I made mine, but here are some links to help you out:

• fly
• spider
• bird
• cat
• dog
• cow
• horse

After reading the story (or watching the Scholastic movie version), students work together to retell the story, taking turns “feeding” the old lady the animals by pushing them into her flip lid mouth.

While this activity represents one of the larger investments I’ve made in a single activity, it is one I don’t use very often. While my older students do truly enjoy this book, this particular activity is not one that I think they’d enjoy, so I keep it for my lower elementary students only.

Cheaper Version

I have seen cheaper versions of this activity around the internet. One of my favorite is probably this one from Laly Mom, using a baby wipe container, milk jug lids, and stickers. I shared the link with another teacher on Facebook last year and, in an effort to recreate it now that you no longer purchase baby wipes in hard-sided containers, she in turn asked a crafty parent at her school if she could make her an old lady that was portable. The mother went home and crocheted the old lady you see pictured around what I think is a disinfectant wipe container (but I’m not 100% on that). My only wish is this talented parent had created a pattern (yes, she did this completely off the top of her head) so I could convince someone to make me a few!

Syrup Bottle Old Lady

As with the previous activity, this one did not originate with me. I first saw it in a 2013 post on Housing A Forest. It’s a very clever, and fun, way for students to practice spelling, and it is also very cheap to make–so cheap that every student could have his/her own old lady, but I still only give them one per group. To make this activity you’ll need three things: old Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup bottles (other versions could be used, but these are made to look like a woman, so they’re extra fun) that have been washed very well, pipe cleaners cut into short pieces, and letter beads.

Other than cleaning the syrup bottles (I tossed mine in the dishwasher), and cutting the pipe cleaners, there’s no prep work for this activity. You simply pass out one syrup bottle per group along with a supply of pipe cleaners and letter beads. Students then string the beads on the pipe cleaner to spell out the names of the various animals and “feed” them to the old woman by placing them in the top of the bottle. Since there are only seven animals this doesn’t take long. I then challenged my students to also spell out the words that rhymed with each animal and “feed” them to the old woman as well. The students often ask me if they can spell other words and soon the poor old woman is eating names, vocabulary words, and a plethora of other things. It’s great vocabulary and spelling practice for all students, and excellent letter recognition practice for my students coming from non-Latin based alphabets.

I’ve also made some activities of my own to practice vocabulary, rhyming words, and sequencing.

Vocabulary Sort Cards

Since I primarily use this book with beginning level students, I wanted to have some focus on vocabulary. Besides the seven animals, I chose six other words (pictured to the left) for a total of fourteen vocabulary words. We talk about the words, find them in the book, and use our sort cards to match the words to pictures representing each one.

Rhyming Sort Cards

One of the things that I really like about this book is how not all of the rhyming words have the same spelling pattern. My older learners are especially adept at knowing which words rhyme based on the spelling, rather than the sound. There are some words in this set that allow them to match them in this manner (i.e.: dog-hog), but there are others that force them to focus on the sound instead (i.e.: fly-die). It’s great practice in phonics/reading and not just pattern matching.

Sequencing Sentences

Putting sentences in order to retell a story is not a new activity for my students (hence the previous blog post on the subject). On this particular set of sentences, I provide students with a picture to help them. As I’ve shared in past posts, I’ve had quite a few older learners who were not yet literate in any language and reading was a big struggle for them. The pictures, and adapted sentences

using similar words as the book, helped them to independently sequence the sentences to retell the story. These strips, along with the vocabulary and rhyming sort cards, were also good references for them as they fed our syrup bottle old lady in the previous activity.

Digital Version

While teaching digitally I still wanted to be able to use this book and activities. I was never able to find a digital way to complete the first couple activities, but I did create drag-and-drop versions of the vocabulary, rhyming, and sequencing activities. In the vocabulary activity, students drag and drop the twelve vocabulary words to match them to their pictures. In the sequencing activity, students drag and drop the animal names next to their pictures (more vocabulary practice) and then drag and drop ordinal words to indicate which order the woman swallowed them in (yet more vocabulary). Finally, in the rhyming activity, students create houses by dragging the blue roofs over the pink houses to match the words that rhyme.

Both sets of activities, paper and digital, are available separately or as a bundle for a 25% discount. The paper version of the activities is also included in my Children’s Literature Super Bundle, which includes 23 different activities for various children’s literature.

There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly is truly a classic and will always be a favorite of mine! If you’re still thinking over which books to enjoy with your students for National Reading Month, I highly encourage you to include this one. Happy teaching, everyone!

Every school I’ve ever worked at wanted to encourage students to read more. Some of the schools tried various programs including using reading logs as homework, Pizza Hut’s Book It! program, Accelerated Reader, and many others. Some worked better than others, but none were as effective as we had hoped, especially for our English language learners.

I’m sure there were many reasons why these programs weren’t as effective for our ELLs, but the two I heard the most (at least from students and parents) were location/economics and language barrier. Our school was located in a low socio-economic area, mere blocks from the Detroit city line. Many of our families did not own vehicles, some did not possess a single household member with a driving license, and public transport was basically non-existent. This made accessing rewards (such as free pizza) nearly impossible, and even getting to the public library (a couple miles away from the school) was difficult. Nearly 80% of our students were classified as ELLs, or former ELLs, and many of our parents and students were first generation immigrants. Many of our families didn’t have a single person at home who was fluent in English, and quite a few of our parents were not literate in their first language either. This made the prospect of having to supervise and help their children read anything, let alone something in English as books in their native language were not readily available, very daunting for our parents.

One of my colleagues and I were discussing this over lunch during summer school one year, trying to think of a way to encourage our students, especially our ELLs, to read for pleasure more. The school day had already been extended and packed full of regular learning, interventions, and remediation, so we knew we’d have to look outside of it. Most of our students walked to school and the older ones often needed to be available to help the family financially, or to watch preschool aged siblings so their parent could work, after escorting younger siblings home from school, so after school was not a viable option either. It was later that week, as we were dealing with the post-breakfast, pre-school-start chaos that it dawned on us–nearly every student in our school arrived at least 30 minutes early in order to eat breakfast, an activity that took them approximately 5 minutes. If we provided them with the location, and some rewards they did not have to travel to claim, they might be willing to use that extra time to read. Thus, the idea for the Morning Reading Club was conceived.

The ESL “classroom” at that time was a storage closet just off the gym/cafeteria, so it was the perfect location. It was a very small area, but our students were used to squeezing into it. We quickly worked out a point system for rewards. Students would earn one point (tracked with stickers on a chart in the room) for each day they came and read for at least 15 minutes. Students could bring their own book, or choose one from the very small library in the classroom, and the book could be anything that interested them: fiction, nonfiction, graphic novel, etc.

Their points were used in two ways. Students could use them to “purchase” various school supplies: pencils, notebooks, erasers, etc. All of them were fun designs and colors but things the students needed to be successful in class. They could also choose to save up their points and “purchase” books. The rewards were purchased with title funds and a small grant we received for helping our immigrant families. The second use of the points was cumulative (including the points they used on supplies and books). We figured out how many days a student would have to participate to have read for 80% of the mornings and this became the ultimate goal. For an ultimate goal we needed an ultimate prize.

We knew we wanted the ultimate prize to be something that was fun but still educationally valuable in some way. Most of our students’ families did not have much in the way of finances before immigrating to the USA, and none of them had money to spare here in the USA. This meant things such as trips to the zoo, museums, and other learning experiences were not part of their lives. The summer we were planning all of this was also the summer we did our week of Cricket vs. Baseball themed learning. This got us got us thinking, the professional baseball season is underway at the end of the school year, none of our students had ever been to a professional baseball game (only a few had been to any professional sporting event at all). Taking in a professional baseball game would be a lot of fun, connect back to their academic learning, and be a cultural experience. Our principal agreed and said she would find the money for the tickets to send two teachers and whatever students earned the opportunity to a Detroit Tigers game.

That fall we launched the program and it met with great success. Our only problem was finding enough space for all of the students who wanted to read! They didn’t mind crowding in, sitting on the floor and in the hall, or even under tables though. Only a few came every morning, but most were there at least three mornings a week.

By the end of the year we’d passed out countless school supplies (which their classroom teachers were thankful for) and quite a few books as well. Only a few earned the trip to the baseball game, all middle schoolers, but we had a great time (my colleague and I watched them more than the game) and it’s something they talked about for years after. The classroom teachers also got behind the program and allowed the ESL teacher in charge of monitoring the room (usually me) to sign students’ reading logs for homework credit.

Beyond the space issue I can’t think of a single downside. Students developed a love of reading and got in some sustained reading time. Discipline issues in the cafeteria went down because students had something to do when they finished eating. Teachers had a fewer students wandering into the classroom early (we sent them up to classrooms about five minutes before the first bell), giving them a few extra minutes to prepare for the day. And I, as room monitor and example to follow, had time to do some fun reading myself! Did it take extra work on my part to track everyone’s participation and reward redemption? Yes. Was a fair amount of classroom management necessary to keep that many students on task before school even started? Yes. Were the results worth it? Absolutely!

I know such a program is not always possible, but it was a wonderful success for us and I feel privileged to have been a part of it. Even if you can’t do the exact same program, I encourage you to brainstorm with your colleagues and come up with something that will work for your specific situation. Happy teaching, everyone!