This week, students have been working on the comprehension skill: predicting. I used the book Tuesday, by David Wiesner, to help teach the skill and to assist in developing a classroom anchor chart regarding predicting.
The unpredictable events of a particular Tuesday unroll before the reader’s eyes with the precision and clarity of a silent movie in this Caldecott Medal-winning book. In this ingenious and imaginative nearly wordless picture book, frogs in a pond lift off on their lily pads and fly to a nearby town where they zoom through a woman’s living room, encounter a dog playing in his yard, and distract a bathrobe-clad citizen from his midnight snack. Who knows what will happen next Tuesday?
I was astonished by the children’s reactions to the book! They were more engaged and excited about the pictures and the story line in this book than they have been over movies, games, and the Internet! I checked out 5 other Wiesner books from the public library and they are hot items around the classroom! We did a brief author study about Wiesner and discovered that he grew up in New Jersey in which is the setting in a few of his books. That led us to infer.
The students love Wiesner’s books… which tells me that no matter how much our world becomes innovative, sometimes a good book is all you need!