Watch for predictable texts/Big Books that contain letter
patterns such as "EI EI O" in "Old MacDonald had a farm" and "B-I-N-G-O"
in the song "Bingo". Pages or charts that contain such text offer excellent
opportunities to draw attention to the differences and similarities between
letters and words.
Predictable books come in a variety of types including
ones that are centred on a familiar sequence (numbers, days, months),
ones that contain recurring phrases or patterns, ones that have rhyming
patterns, and ones that contain cumulative patterns. All of these types
are represented in the Suggestions for Predictable Books. Those listed
represent but a few of the wealth of predictable books now available.
Share titles of favourites that you use, which are not on the list, with
your colleagues! |
Learning from Books
Objectives Students will develop emerging:
- awareness that print and symbols convey meaning
- ability to attend to print, in addition to pictures, when read to
by others
- ability to understand and use directionality of print
- ability to recognize that punctuation guides the reader and helps
to clarify meaning.
Using Big Books and Predictable Books to Develop
Concepts of Print
This strategy is intended to support children's understanding of the following
concepts of print:
- letter
- word
- sentence
- punctuation.
Predictable books have many other uses as well. See Mini-units Using Predictable
Books (p. 142) for ideas related to a range of reading and writing activities.
Materials
- Variety of books/Big Books that make use of predictable patterns (see
the chart on page 69 for suggestions)
- Blank sentence strips, word cards, scissors, and masking tape
- Chart paper and markers
- Pocket chart.
Procedures
- Read the book you have selected to the children, inviting them to
join in with you if they think they know what the book is going to say
next. Children often do this spontaneously without always being able
to talk about the pattern they have identified.
- Each time you reread the book, make use of a form of "Oral Cloze"
by leaving specific words out. For example, if the book makes use of
rhyme, stop before the rhyming word and wait for the children to supply
it. (In a book that uses a repetitive sentence pattern such as "This
is the house that Jack built", children could be encouraged to supply
the entire sentence.) Draw their attention to what they are doing in
each case by saying things such as, "Yes, the word I stopped
at (or left out) is Jack.", or "Good for you, you remember the
whole sentence."
- You can vary the words that you omit from a repetitive sentence pattern
with each subsequent rereading--for example, moving from omitting very
predictable words such as Jack to omitting more difficult ones such
as this and the. In this way, you are encouraging students' use of syntactic
knowledge.
- Write some or all of the text, from the book you are using, on chart
paper. Use the chart to draw attention to concepts of print through
activities like the following. (If your predictable book is in Big Book
format and does not contain too much text, you can use the book instead
of a chart in order to do these activities.)
Sample Activities
- Draw children's attention to the appearance of the sentences
and words through framing them, or moving a pointer along
them as you read (e.g., find "big" words and "small" words).
- Count the number of letters in a few selected words.
- Point out the spaces between words and count the words in
one or two sentences.
- Show students the features of a sentence that help the reader
know where it begins and ends (capitalization of first letter
of first word, periods, question marks, or exclamation marks
at the end).
- Count the number of sentences on one page or on a two-page
spread.
- Frame one sentence and ask students how many words it has
in it, or frame a word and ask students who think they can
read it.
- Write some words and or sentences, that are repeated frequently
in the book, on cards. Hold up one card at a time and ask
"Who can find another word (or sentence) just like this one?"
Explain that words that say the same thing look the same or
have the same letters in the same order. Explain that sentences
that say the same thing contain the same words in the same
order.
- Ask the children to read with you.
- Reread your chart or Big Book more than once. Turn more
and more of the reading over to the children.
|
- Make sentence strips for each of the sentences on the chart. Distribute
them and ask the children to come up to the chart when they think the
sentence being read is the same as the one on their sentence strip.
Have them place their sentence strip under the sentence they feel it
matches. Show the children how to compare the sentence word for word
in a left to right progression. After you have done this once or twice,
just have the children match their sentence with the one on the chart
without doing the word for word matching and ask the children "Is s/he
right? Do they look the same?" Stop before the end of the chart if the
children begin to tire, and tell those who did not have a turn that
you will include them next time. Write their names on the board.
- Follow this lesson up on another occasion by having children cut their
sentence up into the words it contains. Demonstrate once if necessary.
Ask students to work in pairs to scramble their words and then put them
back in the order of the sentence they were given.
- Write words from the predictable book onto word cards and distribute
them to children. Follow the same procedure as the one described for
sentence strips but do letter by letter matching and have students cut
words into letters.
|
Suggestions for Predictable Books
To order books on this list which are not available in your school
division, contact the Learning Resources Distribution Centre, 1500
4th Avenue, REGINA SK S4P 3V7, telephone 787-5987, fax 787-9747,
toll free fax in Saskatchewan 1-800-668-9747.
Predictable books that come in a Big Book format are marked with
an asterisk (*).
A Dark Dark Tale
(Brown)
Animals Should Definitely Not Act Like People (Barrett)
Are You My Mother? (Eastman)
Ask Mr. Bear (Flack)
* Bingo (traditional song, illustrated by Roberts)
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See? (Martin)
Caps for Sale (Slobodkina)
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom! (Martin & Archambault)
* Chicken Soup with Rice (Sendak)
Cookie's Week (Ward)
Dilly Dilly Piccalilli (Livingston)
Drummer Hoff (Emberley)
Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed (retold by Christelow)
Goodnight Moon (Wise Brown)
Go Tell Aunt Rhody (Aliki)
Hattie and the Fox (Fox)
* If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (Numeroff)
I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly (Hawkins & Hawkins)
I Love Ladybugs (Allen)
In My Backyard (De Vries)
Is Your Mama a Llama? (Guarino)
It Looked Like Spilt Milk (Shaw)
Just Like Daddy (Asch)
King Bidgood's in the Bathtub (Wood)
Mary Wore Her Red Dress (Peek)
Millions of Cats(Gag)
Mr. Gumpy's Outing(Burningham)
* Mrs. Wishy-Washy (Cowley)
Mud Puddle (Munsch)
|
Over in the Meadow
(Keats)
Pierre (Sendak)
Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? (Martin)
Rooster's Off to See the World(Carle)
Small Green Snake (Moore)
Suddenly! (McNaughton)
Teeny Tiny (Bennett & De Paola)
The Braggin' Dragon (Martin & Archambault)
The Cake that Mack Ate (Robart)
The Cat on the Mat (Wildsmith)
The Doorbell Rang (Hutchins)
The Gift (Prater)
The Good Bad Cat (Antle)
The House that Jack Built (Stevens)
The Little Engine that Could (retold by Piper)
The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything (Williams)
The Little Red Hen (Galdone)
The Napping House(Wood)
The Other Bone (Young)
The Piggy in a Puddle (Pomerantz)
The Rose in my Garden (Lobel)
The Three Billy Goats Gruff (Brown)
The Teeny, Tiny Woman (Galdone)
* The Very Hungry Caterpillar (Carle)
The Wheels on the Bus (Kovalski)
* Today is Monday (Carle)
Two Bad Ants (Van Allsburg)
We're Going on a Bear Hunt (Rosen)
What do You Do with a Kangaroo? (Mayer)
Where's Spot? (Hill)
Whose Mouse are You? (Kraus)
|
|
|
