Springing To Action: Top Notch Literacy Tips for Your Favorite Skills

HAPPY SPRING!

Welcome to the 

Spring Blooming Readers Linky!

This blog hop features creative posts and 

resource freebies from members of 

The Reading Crew !  

We have collaborated this

month to bring you some of our best literacy tips for your 

teaching your favorite skills.

My post focuses on helping students recognize and use preposition words to help make their writing more descriptive.  A new book I discovered, The Bumblebee Queen by April Pulley Sayre, is the perfect one to help them do that!

Book Summary

Realistic and beautiful watercolor illustrations by Patricia J. Wynne compliment the simple, straightforward text that is full of both action verbs and words that identify time and place.  Previewing the pages shown above is a good way to start a group discussion on how words like behind, beyond, and around help chart the journey of the bee as she looks for a place to build her colony.

Lesson Introduction

After highlighting place and time words in the story, introduce the definition of a preposition and share examples of how they are used in phrases.

Then use either chart paper or the following vocabulary cards to build a word bank or list of familiar preposition.  These can be displayed on a bulletin board or in a pocket chart.  Have students generate their own examples of sentences with prepositions to reinforce their understanding.  Some good examples follow:

The children put the toys inside the cupboard.

The pipes below the sink were broken.

The actors stood on the stage behind the curtain.

Once you have read The Bumblee Queen, go back through the text and re-read sentences with prepositional phrases to reinforce student understanding of the concept.  Examples you will find include:

The bumblebee queen begins the spring below the ground all alone.

New bees and drones emerge from the hive.

Drones from many colonies zoom across the fields, dabbing drops of bee perfume.

You could also use the vocabulary cards to coordinate a movement game where students follow your oral direction that includes one of the preposition words.  For example, you could say:

Zach, look under the front shelf and bring me a Junie B. book. 

Sierra, go across to the window and bring me a blue marker.

Joseph, walk down the hall to the drinking fountain.

How To Use My Freebie

Students can practice reading the preposition poem independently, as a group choral read or with a partner.  They can then highlight the preposition words they find.  A fill-in-the-blank practice worksheet and a write-your-own worksheet are also provided to help you reinforce and assess student understanding.

Literature Links

Another good follow-up activity to this lesson involves providing a variety of non-fiction and fiction books about bees for your students to look through and find more preposition words.  They can then write sentences with the words from their collections.

You will find more useful bee-themed books, activities, art projects, and decor ideas
I have collected
{HERE}!

GET YOUR COPY OF THIS RESOURCE BELOW:

Be sure to check out the next blog post in our linky from Nichole over at The Craft of Teaching!

Once you have read her post all about using mentor texts to teach genres,
be sure to hop through the rest of these great ideas from some of my best blogger buddies. 

Be sure to download all of the fabulous FREEBIES!

As always, thank you for stopping by!  It has been a LONG time since I have blogged and created, and it felt good to get the old juices flowing again!  My chemotherapy treatments leave my brain in a bit of a fog most days, but I hope that you will find my tips for teaching grammar skills clear and useful!

If you enjoy the content I share, be sure that you are following me on Instagram, Twitter,  Facebook, and Pinterest!  I also have a newsletter that I try to send out at least twice a month with useful tips and freebies that you can use in your classroom.  You can sign-up using your e-mail on the right sidebar!

Know that I truly appreciate your patronage, and hope that you will continue to share quality literature in your classrooms that will interest and encourage your students to be blooming readers!

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Warm Regards,

An InLinkz Link-up