Dr. de Soto and The Grinch

Greetings friends!

We are wrapping up our community unit this week and I decided what better way to do that than with a narrative input on Dr. de Soto?

For those of you who have not read this book, it is about a dentist mouse and his wife who help a fox with a dental problem.  This fox, as I believe most foxes would agree, wanted to eat the mice and the mice suspected this was so.  The mice, being the clever little creatures they are, glued the fox's mouth shut by tricking him into believing it was a new pain medication.  Hardy harr harr.

To finish out the narrative input (pictures of which are coming, I promise) we made foxes!  It was directed art with NO blackline masters!  Their work is incredible!  We did it step by step, first cutting out rectangles, then triangles, then a tail, then a mouse-house shape and glued it all together.  Here's the master of the fox (that I made WHILE showing them what to do.  Little secret: this art project was so last minute, I nearly panicked!)

And shockingly, NO fox jokes!

Here's the background I drew for my narrative input on Dr. de Soto:

Last week, we did The Grinch.  Oh boy was that one fun!  Here's THAT background that I also drew:

Then I drew the cards for this story.  I chose key pictures from the story that I felt really helped summarize that particular chunk of the story.  Then, on the back, I wrote a brief summary of that part.  The idea is to limit the summaries to somewhere between 7-10 pictures.  Then you go through and tell the story as a story, not as a book.  The second time you do it, you create popsicle stick puppets that the kids use to act out the story.  The third time, you have them help you narrate the story and then act it out in person.  Here are the summary cards:

You put them on the background in sequential order, like this:

The last day, we made a Grinch craft.  In the Grinch's mouth we wrote a sentence about his emotion.  "Yo veo el Grinch ______".  Here's the anchor chart I made:

Sadly, I apparently have not taken a picture of the craft itself.

Tomorrow, we're doing the writing portion for Dr. de Soto.  I'll post that picture once we're done with it!

Ho ho ho and all that jazz!