I love the book Bunnicula! I was exstatic a few weeks ago when the little girl I babysit suggested that we read it before bed. For those of you that don't know Bunnicula is written from the point of view of the family dog. The dog writes about the excitement that follows the finding of a bunny in the movie theater while seeing Dracula. The irony of irony is that the bunny (who they so cleverly name Bunnicula) is a vampire! But that is not the best part; the bunny sucks the color out of vegtables!
I have some different ideas that I want to use this book for, unfortunatly they don't really fit together. I think that Bunnicula could be a great seqway into learning about different animals and whether they are carnivors, herbavors, omnivors and what that means for their diets. I also think it would be neat to use Bunnicula along with other books to look at different examples of fiction.
If I were going to use the book to look at the different animals "eating preferences" I would do a thematic unit. If I were going to use it along with other fiction books I would do a literature focus unit.
I am sorry this is so brief-- I am very worn out from three days straight of wedding "fun".
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
The biggest news of the week was the food poisoning I came down with Tuesday night and that I am still recovering from. Luckily on Monday night when I was babysitting something happened that was related to our class.
As I mentioned in class before the little girl that I babysit for had an assignment last week to write a paragraph using her spelling words. What I learned this Monday is that the class is told to practice the words five times each as an assignment prior to writing their paragraphs. I was very impressed with the mothers approach to this task ; instead of making her daughter write all of the words, she lets her paint them. This takes a good ten minutes longer than it would if she were just writing them but it does make the homework enjoyable.
I am not sure painting the words has any benefit other than fun wise, but I do think that the teacher assigning spelling-related homework is a big step in the right direction. I believe in class we established that the norm of teaching spelling was to give the words out out Monday and not talk about them again until Friday. Perhaps there is hope for learning spelling yet.
As I mentioned in class before the little girl that I babysit for had an assignment last week to write a paragraph using her spelling words. What I learned this Monday is that the class is told to practice the words five times each as an assignment prior to writing their paragraphs. I was very impressed with the mothers approach to this task ; instead of making her daughter write all of the words, she lets her paint them. This takes a good ten minutes longer than it would if she were just writing them but it does make the homework enjoyable.
I am not sure painting the words has any benefit other than fun wise, but I do think that the teacher assigning spelling-related homework is a big step in the right direction. I believe in class we established that the norm of teaching spelling was to give the words out out Monday and not talk about them again until Friday. Perhaps there is hope for learning spelling yet.
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