Dear Families,

First thing this morning, we continued with our study of wordless picture books. Each student chose a single illustration from a collection of books and wrote their own story based on what they saw. We had stories about frogs and grandmas, hermit crabs and flying pigs, and a surprising number of stories featuring velociraptors. Later on, we made the switch from wordless picture books to picture-less word-books, and I had to read B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures aloud to the class. As your kids will tell you, I was so embarrassed.

We also spent part of the morning learning about our third and final type of figurative language for the week: personification. We read and discussed Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem “My Shadow,” and drew the four seasons in the form of people. In the afternoon, we learned about concrete poems. After reading some examples, and writing some practice drafts in their notebooks, the class copied their own concrete poems into their Wordplay booklets. I was super impressed with these. Students intuitively grasped the relationship between form and subject in a concrete poem. They wrote poems in the shape of poodles, presidents, rectangles that were also rocket ships, and all manner of other objects.

Looking forward to seeing you all at the showcase tomorrow!

Optional extension activity: Have students create their own wordless picture book—one that zooms out into a bigger picture with each new page, like in Flotsam and Zoom.

Flotsam and Tuesday by David Wiesner

The Lion and the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney

Time Flies by Eric Rohmann

Zoom by Istvan Banyai (*this was the class favorite by far)

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