Old Lady Shell Retell!

Since I have been working on ocean materials, I thought I would share one of my favorite books that I use for beach/ocean theme…There Was An Old Lady Who Swallows A Shell by Lucille Colandro and illustrated by Janet Lee.

I adore these books, and there is one for almost every season!  They are really great for teaching sequencing, “why” questions,temporal and size concepts, fantasy vs. realism, and vocabulary.  I also created some fun crafts with my kindergarten, first, and second grade students.The first is an idea I saw on several sites.  All you need is the printable OLD LADY, a plastic baggy, and pics from the story.  I used Boardmaker symbols for all the things the Old Lady swallowed, but you could also use clip art from the web like THIS.  After we read the book, the students colored their Lady, cut, and glued her to the baggy.  This is great for working on story retell, sequencing, and the vocabulary.  And as they put each picture in the bag, it looks like its in her tummy!The next one is an idea I came up with on my own…since the lady burps up a sandcastle, I thought why not let the kids create one!  I took sand colored construction paper and cut it with stair steps so that it gets smaller at the top.  I had this part ready for the kids.  Then I gave them each a set of Boardmaker pictures to put in order.  In my example, I wrote the sentences and some of my students were able to do that, but I also printed them out and cut them into strips to be sequenced by others.  You can download the pre-printed sentences HERE.  This is where you can really differentiate what you target with each student depending on their goals.  With writing their own sentences, they can work on syntax and conventions.  If they use the preprinted strips, you can target decoding and rhyming words.   This is also the activity I used to work on size concepts.  I hope you can see why I love these books so much!   The possibilities are endless!