Have you met these adorable friends? The one on the left is Gerald Elephant and the little one on the right is his friend Piggie the Pig. These two characters come out of the brilliant imagination of Mo Willems, author extraordinaire!
Mo Willems wrote 25 books about Elephant and Piggie. The stories are funny, and are the perfect books for the students to read and practice their fluency. What is fluency? The definition that I found from readingrockets.org is
Fluency is the ability to read a text accurately, quickly, and with expression. Fluency is important because it provides a bridge between word recognition and comprehension. When fluent readers read silently, they recognize words automatically. They group words quickly to help them gain meaning from what they read.
The students are working on reading in groups of words or phrases, and making their reading sound as if they were just talking to another person, the way they speak in real life.
Since Elephant and Piggie are talking to each other in these silly books, the students are really practising this new skill. BUT, in these books, Elephant and Piggie are often whispering, shouting, and sounding worried or angry, so the students are using their Eagle Eyes to look carefully at the characters' facial features and body language to figure out how the words should be said.
The students really loved making their own versions of these cute characters!
This week, the students are meeting a new, and just as famous, character named Pigeon.
In these books, Pigeon does a lot of talking, but he is talking to the reader. The students are learning how to imagine what they might say back to Pigeon if they were in the situation that is happening in the story.
Today, the students followed some guided drawing directions and added these characters to the front of their duotang. Cute, right?
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