Welcome to another monthly edition of Books Teachers Love. This month I am going to be discussing a book called, "Dino-Basketball" by: Lisa Wheeler. A few years ago, during the March Madness craze, I was looking for a book to tie in with a basketball theme. I found this book. It included dinosaurs and basketball! So, basically a win, win in a first grade classroom!
The book is about plant eating and meat eating dinosaurs playing a game of basketball. It tells the story in such an exciting way! It really gets the kids engaged!
I use this book to go over a variety of concepts with the students.
I pull out these handy, dandy posters to place on my focus wall for the week.
The focus for each lesson is at the top of the poster. This is what I teach for our mini-lesson for the day!
Here are a few examples of the mini-lessons in action!
Sometimes, the students and I do an activity together for the mini-lesson!
Here, the students and I are learning to confirm our predictions.
We do this lesson before I read the whole book.
For the lesson, I review what it means to predict. Then, I fold a piece of paper in half. The paper has a little story on it. Before I unfold the piece of paper, students predict what they think will happen next. I wrote down their responses on the anchor chart. We then, read the rest of the story. We found out we were not correct! We then learned how to use evidence from the story to tell why our prediction was incorrect!
Here is a peek at another lesson!
(Sorry for blurry pictures - this was two whole years ago!!)
In this lesson, we look at the differences between fiction and non-fiction! We compare and contrast the two. I read a non-fiction dinosaurs book to help us out with our comparisons!
Afterwards, the students completed a cut and glue activity. Then, during read to self, they explained why the book they read was fiction or non-fiction!
Throughout our time with this book, we also go over using nouns, verbs and adjectives to help us describe the setting. We learn about pronouns and we learn to use context clues to determine the meaning of new words!
For each day of the week, there are detailed lesson plans with the common core standard that is aligns to! If you're interested in using this book in your classroom, you can find the activities here.
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