Corduroy

The first book I decided to "row" was Corduroy, by Don Freeman.  I picked it because I remember it being a favorite of mine, and since it's about a teddy bear I figured there would be lots of fun and engaging activities that would hold the kids' attention.  

Our Bible verse for this week was Proverbs 17:17 - A friend loves at all times.  We talked about what it means to be a friend.  ("To be a friend is not to pull Abby's hair or hit her in the face."  Wow.  I'm so glad we are covering this first!)

The kids were thrilled when I told them that in order to start reading the book they needed to find their teddies. 

We took a trip to the store to find food items that were bear related...and he found Teddy Grahams.  I told him in order to do another activity he needed to find the Gummy Teddy Bears.  He found them no problem. 

 

We went outside and on the cement I drew bear prints and wrote in the vowels.  We played a modified version of hop-scotch...bear-scotch!  

We reviewed specific letters - the vowels and the short sounds they make.  This was a piece of cake for him, as he has all his letters and sounds mastered.  We also played a letter version of "Go Fish" where you have to match the capital letter with the small letter.  

For a bit of math practice we did gummy bear sorting/graphing.  He sorted his dish of bears out according to color and counted the number of each color.  He was very patient while doing this, as he really wanted to eat them.  After sorting and coloring I let him eat them.  

 We made a teddy bear puppet.

The weather here has been sweltering, so we took a day and went to the beach to cool off.  Abby was insistent that p.e. not be left out, so she did a bit of yoga on the beach.  Look at the way she holds her legs - so straight!  This beach babe has certainly mastered the Downward Dog!  Way to go, Abby!

We also started something new - animal classification.  The animals shown are the animals that were in the Corduroy book.  Each card has a picture along with a characteristic of the animal.  ("Giraffes are the tallest land animal.")  I'm planning on making a book of all our "rows" so I glued the animal cards on construction paper for better organization.  

We talked about feelings, since Corduroy felt sad and then at the end of the book he felt happy to have a friend.  William decided that this day he felt happy!

We made a rhyming book that did a great job of summarizing the story.  He had to match the rhyming words with the correct picture.

The kids colored Corduroy bears (okay, the picture on the right was colored mostly by me, since Abby insisted on "more help!").  William colored the "friends" bear and they also made a pocket to hold name cards. 

No week of learning about bears and "studying" Corduroy is complete without munching on a bear's favorite food - Honey Comb! 

(I also had William give me an oral narration of Corduroy.  My plan was to write it down and include it in our book, but I ended up asking questions to prompt him, so I took a video which I'm not including.  Sorry!  Let's just say he can pretty much retell the story perfectly.)

I think we all enjoyed this book and I know I am looking forward to our next row!