Sunday, July 1, 2012

My Favorite Childhood Book and a Giveaway

Hey everyone!! I hope you have been enjoying the guest blog spots this week as much as I have! I have another week of fantabulous guest bloggers lined up for you while I continue with the last leg of my east coast vacay. Today the hubs and I traveled from NY up to Vermont where we will be spending our last  few days relaxing lakeside with my sister in law and her little one. But tonight, I'm tuning in quickly to share with you a recent discovery of mine and give you a chance to participate in a sweet giveaway if you're willing to tell me a little bit about your favorite childhood book.




This is my favorite childhood book.


It's a rhyming book that teaches you teasing isn't nice.


It was originally published in the 1960's and has long since been out of print.


When I looked for it on Amazon 2  years ago, it was only selling first additions for $200- YIKES!


I own the original. But I never take it to school, because I'm saving it for my children and worry something might happen to it.



Then a few days ago, and I started to see bloggers talking about The Clever School Teacher.


So I checked it out. Oh my word, it is such a great resource for teachers!! You can by books that have already been organized by standards, genres, specific comprehension skills, grade levels,  and a variety of other categories they are adding daily such as word study and writers workshop unit texts. You can purchase  individual books or whole sets by each of the above categories. If you know what you want to teach, they know which books to use which eliminates the guess work!


On Deanna Jump's blog post about the Clever School Teacher she said to go look for your favorite book on the site. Well, that got me thinking, what skills could I use Never Tease a Weasel to teach to my firsties?  For no rational reason whatsoever (since I knew such an old book would not be on this new website) I typed in Never Tease a Weasel into the Clever School Teacher search engine. And to my absolute shock, I found this!




It's my favorite childhood book re-released with new illustrations!! I couldn't believe it!


Apparently I'm not the only one who loved this story because it was republished in 2011, unbeknownst to me :) The Clever School Teacher had it listed a a primary grade level text that could be used to teach the Comprehension Skill of Predicting. Being familiar with the story, this made complete sense to me.

The Clever School Teacher has been kind enough to award one lucky reader a  $10 Gift Certificate towards any purchase at their store! AND -- if you spend $25, shipping and handling is free. So you can purchase $25 worth of books for only $15!!


Here's how to enter:

1) Go to  The Clever School Teacher and search for one of your favorite childhood books.

2) Comment back on this post with the title of your book and what meaningful lesson or skill you can use to teach your class with this book.

That's it! I will select a random winner next Sunday!!


And check back tomorrow for the next guest blogger spot by my friend Kelley from Teacher Idea Factory :)


Sour Apple Studio





20 comments:

  1. This website is AMAZING! Thanks for sharing!

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  2. My favorite childhood book is "It Looked Like Spilt Milk". It could be used for teaching predicting. Great idea for a giveaway! :)
    Lisa
    Learning Is Something to Treasure

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  3. Thanks for getting me thinking...My dad used to take all six of his kids,including me to the library every Saturday morning. One that was at our house more than the library was "Burt Dow Deep-Water Man". I would love to use this book for teaching connections. Most kids connect with storms and band-aides!
    Jenny

    Owl Things First

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  4. Oh wow, memories for sure! I searched for the book, Miss mary Mack and it was there! I remember my Kindergarten teacher using this song-not sure if she had a book, to help with teaching rhyming words! Would love to have that one for sure!

    kellybrown28021@gmail.com

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  5. Okay, I didn't find my book on the site so I googled it. Come to find out it is selling on Amazon for $1600! My copy of Lonesome Sam will stay behind the glass with all its worn and loved pages! Thanks for the website!
    Jennifer
    jnfrogers@hotmail.com

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  6. I loved Stone Soup in Kindergarten - we even made some! I would use it to teach predictions, or possibly as a Trickster story for the 3rd grade common core.

    kellys3ps@sbcglobal.net

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  7. I love to use "It Looked Like Spilt Milk" After we read the book, we make a classroom book. I also read them one I wrote in college years ago. It looked like a mud puddle... but it was really a melted chocolate bar. The students love it & are then eager to start their book!

    imgoingfirst@gmail.com

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  8. I loved the Boxcar Children because my mom had copies she use to read. Found it! I would use it to compare and contrast or for character traits.
    Melissa
    Mandmyoung@chartermi.net

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  9. I have always loved the Poky Little Puppy (I think it was because my father was a wonderful reader and I LOVED to hear him read). I read it every year with my kids before field trips and talk about how they have to listen and stay with the group...GREAT BOOK!
    kinderdots@gmail.com

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  10. My favorite book was The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. The Clever School Teacher has it is Spanish. :-) I often use it to teach writing with narrative voice. Also, in second grade, we do a fairy tale unit, so it ties in there, too.

    Psyched to be in 2nd!

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  11. I loved all the Ramona books as a kid and enjoy sharing Ramona the Pest as a teacher read aloud. It can be used to teach about misunderstandings with an adult/teacher/student. You can also do character comparisons (i.e. Ramona/Susan) as well as many other things!

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  12. My favorite childhood book is Amelia Bedelia. I dressed up like her during our reading appreciation week and my students loved it!

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  13. My favorite childhood book is Caps for Sale, this story is in our reading curriculum, I love reading it aloud and then adding it to our listening center for the kids to listen to again. I teach predicting with this book, sometimes we play Simon Says or Monkey See, Monkey Do, to emphasize the ideas from the book!

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  14. My favorite childhood book is Peter Cottontail. I would read it over and over! In fact, I still like it!!
    susanlulu@yahoo.com

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  15. My favorite childhood book was the mitten. I always thought it was silly how all of those animals kept going into the mitten. I always thought that it was a magical mitten :) I like this book and find it useful for helping teach using your imagination. It would be impossible for all of those animals to fit into a mitten, but in this book they did. The book helps to introduce that for writing stories :)

    Heidi
    My (Not So) Elementary Life
    mynotsoelementarylife@yahoo.com

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  16. My all time favorite book was The Little Red Hen and sure enough there are several versions over at the Clever School Teacher - including one in Spanish! I would love to get some different versions of The Little Red Hen so we could compare the stories - get a Venn Diagram going and graph which version we liked the best etc. Not to mention it's great for sequencing and life cycles, has repetitious next (Not I said the cat, Not I said the dog! That was always my favorite park) plus it teaches that hard work pays off!

    Jennifer @ Herding Kats In Kindergarten

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  17. My favorite childhood book isn't in your store, but it's "The Show Me Book". I loved it for the silly sayings and pictures. The book that I would choose now is "Birds of a Feather" just because one of the new ESL Standards in AZ is teaching idioms. This book would help out a lot by showing students the difference between the literal meaning of a phrase and the actual meaning. :)

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  18. I absolutely loved anything by Richard Scarry (yes, that is dating me!)...searching for Lowly Worm was so fun! I think they would be good for predicting and making connections....And, for illustration techniques.

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  19. I loved the book Where Does the Butterfly Go When it Rains? I looked it up on the Clever School Teacher site and found it! It has new illustrations, though. I have an old copy that I bring out each year when I teach about "forever" books; those books we read over and over. It's part of the frontloading lessons I found on Mrs. Meacham's site.
    Michelle

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  20. I love Never Tease a Weasel too. My aunt use to always read it to me when I was a kid. She gave me a version of it a few years ago.
    Ms. Kerri and her Krazy Kindergarten

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