Digital Books vs. Print Books: The Consensus

Digital books versus print books: is it beneficial to use digital books? When?

• The realm of digital books is fairly new. Young children, such as Pre-K-ers, may have a hard time understand what's going on. There's a lot happens within a digital book, i.e: music, voiceover, animated objects, sounds, etc. This may be distracting to some students, and could prohibit them from understanding what is going on within the story.

• It could possibly be beneficial if the story is read in an engaging way, and allows students to interact with the story.

• A great digital book resource can be found at www. storylineonline.net --> visit to our resources page for a quick link to the site!

Know your students, and understand how they learn best and decide which to use [digital books vs. print books] from there!

Storywalks: using picture books with no words is a great way to engage students with a story, and to help them develop their comprehension abilities.

Here are some books that your child will love...

Pancakes For Breakfast

By Tomie DePaola

(click on the book cover to be redirected to Amazon.com for bibliography info, and to purchase the book!)

The Lion & the Mouse

By Jerry Pinkney

(click on the book cover to be redirected to Amazon.com for bibliography info, and to purchase the book!)

The Writing Prompts in our classroom: a great way to help those writers who seem to be in a rut. We have a writing prompt bucket where students can reach in and grab a prompt!

let's focus on timelines!

• Family History- interview a grandparent and write about your historical family timeline

• What will you be doing, and what will you look like when you're 100?

• How did you get that scar?

• Write about a pet you have/had

• Find a type of history you're interested in (Disney princesses throughout time, sports, etc.)

Troy suggested that we have a bulletin board that shows our current "pool of knowledge" - all of the mini-lessons that we have already covered, adding them to the board as we go so that students have this information and can go back to it!

Writing with detail... How do we get our students interested?

• "Show, don't tell"- a great way to explain what detail is

• Using acting in the classroom, what actions are you doing?

• How did you feel when something specific happened to you? What did you do?

• Cristina suggested: Explain to someone (who has never done it) how you sit in a chair. Writing in detail about the individual steps it takes to do this simple task.

• Caroline suggested: How to fold a fitted sheet? Have to ask someone who knows, and then use a lot of descriptive words to write about it.

First Grade Common Core Standards & books that apply to these:

• Puke & Poo (Disgusting Body Facts) by Angela Roysten- ELACC-1W1,provide a sense of closure

• Around the House, The Fox Chased the Mouse (Adventures in Prepositions) by Rick Walton- ELACC-1L1, use frequently occurring prepositions

• Exclamation Mark by Amy Rosenthal- ELACC-1L2, use end punctuation for sentences

Love,

Ms. Verner