Pre-Kindergarten Literacy: Introducing Parts of a Book

Summary This lesson was designed for use in a pre-kindergarten classroom over the course of the literacy block, with built in brain breaks for students. The goal was to introduce students to the parts of the book, as well as help them with the unit’s essential question, “How do good readers read books?” Using a shared reading format, students were introduced to the book through an interactive experience; they were asked to describe a strawberry that had been placed before them. Since the book being read centered on a strawberry, the objective was to provide students with both a shared experience and background knowledge, as well as integrate a science standard of using the 5 senses to describe an object. The focus then turned to the big book version of The Big Hungry Bear, where the parts of the book were modeled before giving out smaller copies of the same book to students. As a group the children searched for different parts of the book, sharing aloud to a partner as well as silently showing the teacher. After the introductory period, students followed along as the big book was read, modeling proper word correspondence with a large hand pointer and dramatic wording to model

(Tompkins, 2005). When I first began working on developing a pre-kindergarten program at my current school I was discouraged by a lot of boxed curriculums due to the lack of quality literature available to students. With this in mind I worked with a team to begin developing a well rounded curriculum for our youngest readers that would not only teach them how to read but would allow them to fall in love with reading as an art. Shared reading and thematic units are the crux of this curriculum. The lesson I presented was a trial run of a lesson that is being designed for use next