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The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton was first published in 1942 but remains a favorite of many. It tells the story of a Little House — from the house’s perspective — that is located in the country, is lived in, and surrounded by beauty.

As the Little House sees the distant lights of the city, she wonders what it would be like to live in the city, and as time goes on, she finds the city growing until she is surrounded by it and no one lives in her anymore...

These lessons would occur over a period of several days. I usually begin with Hilda Must Be Dancing, but it doesn’t matter which story you choose to work on first.

Read the story to the children. Present a map to the children of a complete episode with the icons going down the center. You may use either chart paper or use the magnets on a white board, as shown.

After reading one of the stories, map it out, icon by icon, engaging the children in the process. After reading one of the stories, map it out, icon by icon, engaging the children in the process. Keep the chart up and model retelling the story using your SGM^® Teacher Marker…

The “Core” of The Core manual contains many hands-on materials for student use. One of my favorites is the Expository “My Research” Cut–and-Fold Booklet. I have used this in many settings and grade levels, including centers and with intervention groups. Instructions are included in the manual.

Sea Turtles by Gail Gibbons is one book that works very well with this activity since it includes all expository text structures. As an added resource, Maryellen recently did a section of a webinar on the topic of sea turtles that you might be interested in viewing. (Click here to view Sea Turtles expository analysis excerpt.)...

Today, we will look at some writing samples using the topic of Koalas and ideas to scaffold the process from using the Character Descriptive Map to paragraphs. As stated previously, any book/resource that you use may be adapted to these activities.

We used several resources including:

• Zoobooks: Koalas & Other Australian Animals
• Koala by Caroline Arnold, Photography by Richard Hewett

We followed the same procedure as in the Armadillo and Cheetah lessons: reading short segments, making a list of facts, and placing each fact in the correct category (physical appearance, habitat, food and eating, young, special characteristics)...

Our recent blog, The Snow Walker, concluded our three-part winter-themed blogs (for this year!). We are hopefully moving towards warmer temperatures, as we begin April. April also begins National Autism Awareness Month. In light of that, throughout the month, our blogs will focus on the development of feelings, perspective taking, theory of mind, and empathy. The Story Grammar Marker^® provides a visual, explicit way of analyzing the motivations, feelings, thoughts/mental states and plans of characters (and of people in real life situations).

Picture books are excellent resources for helping to develop children’s emotional literacy. As educators, we know that combining visual images and text plays a significant role in working with our students. In an article in The Reading Teacher (Vol. 67, Issue 4, December 2013/2014), Maria Nikolajeva writes that “picturebooks are perfect training fields for young people’s theory of mind and empathy.” In this blog, we are going to use the book Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch written by Eileen Spinelli and illustrated by Paul Yalowitz to begin to demonstrate feelings, theory of mind, perspective taking and empathy.

Earth Day is honored around the world on April 22 for the purpose of shining a light on environmental programs and fostering community activism through a variety of different events and activities. Earth Day is the largest civic event in the world! It is celebrated around the globe by people of all cultures, backgrounds, and nationalities. More than a billion people participate in Earth Day Festivities each year. Up here in New England, it is 70 degrees today (although we still have patches of snow on the ground!!) but the warm weather reminded us that Earth Day will be here before we know it!

Earth Day is a great occasion to introduce the book entitled Winston of Churchill: One Bear's Battle Against Global Warming by Jean Davies Okimoto (Author) and Jeremiah Trammell (Illustrator). This picture book is a combination of narrative and expository text structures. The narrative, or story, is about polar bears planning a protest against environmental factors negatively affecting their habitat in Churchill, Canada. It contains all narrative elements of story grammar as well as perspective taking.

This past week my 5-year-old daughter Casey went to camp. On the first day, I suggested that she wear a T-shirt that depicts something she likes (LOL: Dolls, Unicorns, JoJo Siwa, Mermaids, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc.) so that when she is meeting new friends, they can immediately know something she likes and ask her about it. She chose a T-shirt with a picture of “JoJo Siwa,” who is a young, popular performer. By wearing that, new friends will know a little about her as a “character” in a social setting. Upon arriving at camp, within 30 seconds, a Dad and daughter walked in and the Dad said, “You like Jojo Siwa? Avery and her mom saw Jojo Siwa in a concert this summer!”...

In the early 1970s, I began my work as a Speech/Language Pathologist in the Hartford, Connecticut Public Schools. The department head, Margaret Kennedy, an Iowa native, was trying to entice someone to teach a “Language Disabilities Class” at Dwight School in the South End. Language Disability was the new term in our field at that time. I had just gotten my Master’s Degree at Penn State and had an enlightening summer course in “language disabilities” under my belt. We used Helmer Myklebust’s text entitled Differential Diagnosis of Language Impairments, as our basic text and studied intervention methodologies such as the Association Method, developed at Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, the ITPA, Auditory Discrimination in Depth (now known as Lindamood/Lindamood)...