Clifford, David, and Wilma

Week 7

PreK3, PreK4, Kinder: Guiding Question - How do we turn pages so books stay neat? What does an author/illustrator do?

We read Clifford, the Big Red Dog, by Norman Bridwell.

I showed them part of a video of Bridwell talking about how he got the idea for Clifford. We also looked at the Clifford games on our library website from PBS Kids and Scholastic. The read-along stories at Scholastic are particularly good for our emerging readers in kindergarten.


We practiced our corner-turning, each using a different Clifford book, while singing a little ditty I made up.

Sing to the tune of "Are you sleeping/Frere Jacques"

Corner-turning, Corner-turning
As I look, in my book
Turn from every corner
Turn from every corner
Every page
Every page.


Grade 1 and 2: Guiding Question - What are the parts of a book? What library rules do we know?

We continued with making our "Library Rules" books in the style of David Shannon's character "David" from No, David! We read David Gets in Trouble. This, by the way, was the favorite "David" book for all classes. Interesting!

As students worked, I read aloud from You Must Be Joking! by Paul Brewer who will visit with his wife, Kathleen Krull, on Oct. 8/9. 

Our favorite joke: Why did the toilet paper run downhill? To get to the bottom. (hee hee...love first and second grade giggles)


Grades 3, 4, 5: Guiding Question - Who was Wilma Rudolph and how can we find some reliable information about her?

We are gearing up for our visit with Kathleen Krull. This week we read Wilma Unlimited, featured on the week's Book Talk Tuesday post. 

The videos at the end of the post were a hit with students. One shows her amazing acceleration in a sprint, another gives an example of what polio does to a child's leg, and another lets us hear Ms Rudolph speak about her experiences.

Some classes also completed a mini-research task using Wallwisher, World Book Kids, and Encyclopedia Britannica. The task: post three facts on the class wall about Wilma Rudolph found on the two encyclopedia sites and copy/paste the handy citation at the bottom of the article.

I am a big Wallwisher fan. It's the easiest tool for quickly creating a space where a class can post info, questions, and such. You can have it open for their work, then lock it for class viewing. For individual student boards, I like Lino.it, but for a class - Wallwisher is great. Here's a pdf with detailed directions on creating boards.