We acted out and retold the story using recurring phrases and the characters. The story pattern and repetitive phrases made this story perfect for retelling and acting out.
We retold the story using the characters. We made a list of the characters in the order they appeared in the story using interactive writing. Then I had my students work with their elbow partner to order picture cards of the characters and retell the story to one another.
Since the book is full of rhyming words, we did a rhyming word sort in the pocket chart. I gave out the cards to all of the students and then as one student placed a card in the pocket chart, the other student came up and made the match.
Since we have been learning about nouns, we also made a noun tree map. We sorted noun picture cards into persons and animals, places, and things.
We have been doing a lot of work with understanding characters and using characters to help us become better readers. We made a bubble map to describe the witch. I was really proud of the words my students came up to describe the witch. We talked about wanting to describe the character from the inside. We have only done this a few times, but they are already a lot better at it. Then we made witch legs to go with our bubble map. You can get all of the picture cards and instructions and shoe pattern for these activities here.
We also did some Room on the Broom math. I made a giant broom. Then we used it to make sets, to count backwards, and to decompose numbers. We started simple by adding the characters one at a time to the broom. We counted how many we had each time and talked about the pattern of adding one more. When we count we always count left to right and right to left and we also talk about ways to organize what we are counting to make it easier to count and keep up with. Then we did a little decomposing with the number 5. I separated the students into groups on the broom using simple story problems. Everyone stayed on the broom, but we grouped them differently so that we could see all of the different ways we could make 5. We also talked about greater than and less than. As we added characters to the broom or took them off we talked about which amount was greater or less and then we discussed why.
Students used "broomsticks" and counters to practice independently what we were doing together on the big broom.