Category: What We’re Reading

This week we read “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” by Judi Barrett.  We have been learning about seasons and weather, so this book was a perfect extension.  In the town of Chewandswallow all inhabitants get their food from the sky.  There are no grocery stores, people just carry their cutlery with them so they are ready to eat whenever the food arrives.  Things are just peachy (pun intended!) until the weather starts to go wild.  The school is crushed by a giant pancake and the pea soup fog is so thick no one can see a thing!  The residents build rafts from the giant slices of stale bread, and sail to a safer land, where rain and snow is the only thing to fall from the sky.

After reading, I presented the class with a challenge to create their own weather forecast for the town of Chewandswallow.  We made a list of possible foods and possible weather phenomena, and then the students wrote their own.  The criteria was that their forecast had to include at least one food and one type of weather.  We had some wonderful word pictures!  A few of my favourites: foggy freezies and snowy skittles, an avalanche of jello, candy tornadoes with chocolate milk rain, and a tsunami of popsicles.  Stay tuned – we are currently working on diamante poems.  After this wonderful weather language I am expecting some more powerful writing!

This week we read the Gingerbread Man by Jim Aylesworth, which is the traditional story of the Gingerbread Man, when he jumps out of the oven and runs away from the husband, wife, and various animals before being eaten by the fox.  On Friday we read Gingerbread Pirates by Kristin Kladstrup. In this version a boy makes cookies to leave out for Santa, and they come alive once he falls asleep.  The pirate captain tries to rescue his sailors from jail (the cookie jar), and eventually Santa gives them a ship at the end of the story.  We talked about how the author of Gingerbread Pirates created her own characters based on the gingerbread man.  Then we used that idea to create our own characters.  Some students chose traditional gingerbread girls and boys, but we also had a gingerbread bride, a gingerbread soldier, gingerbread zombies and gingerbread angels.