The Little Red Hen Unit

Did anyone else come out of their first year of teaching with a bunch of goals and aspirations? I mean, that's what it is to be a teacher, right? One of my (many) goals was to improve literature instruction. 

I wanted to be able to incorporate not just reading a book, but also looking at story elements, develop re-telling skills, learning vocabulary words, and allowing the students to connect the story to themselves, others stories, and the world. Not just every once in a while, but for every story, every week. I also wanted to expose my students to all kinds of good, classic literature for their age level, with folk tales and fairy tales and new, more modern stories mixed in. I wanted to intentionally reinforce all these skills and introduce meaningful texts, and not let them get lost in the "not enough time" dilemma or to allow bad curriculum to hold me back. 

So over the summer I did a lot of research and checked a lot of books out of the library and planned out the book that we would be reading each week. The problem I ran into was wanting to keep my literature at least loosely connected to our social studies/science theme for the week, but also having a good range of literature for the students to be exposed to. But hey, I made it work, and last week, we had our first traditional literature unit of the year - The Little Red Hen, with our social studies unit being community and community helpers. 

In order to help with the re-telling skill of this story, I made some little stick puppets of the characters. I just found some free printables of the story online, colored them, laminated them, and then taped them onto craft sticks. After using them to retell the story during the lesson, I also put them out at a center for a few days. The kids loved going to that center and saying "Not I!" and "Then I'll do it myself!" over and over. 

On Friday, my plan is to always do an activity to connect the story to the students' lives or allow them to get deeper into the story. So we took some time to bake bread! Rather than dealing with yeast and sticky dough, I chose for us to make cornbread, and we made it in muffin tins so they were easy to serve! Pretty much, I had the ingredients pre-measured and the students all got to help put the ingredients into the bowl and stir. They were SO excited to eat them! They each got one at snack and one to take home, and surprisingly, they all ate them. I guess I don't have any picky eaters this year. If you could see their excited little faces in these photos, it would melt your heart. It was a lot of work but definitely worth it! 

God's blessings and happy teaching!

Mikaela