It's Ice Cream Time!

One of my newest and "yummiest" resources for teachers and parents:

Ice Cream Time Multi-Use Templates Patterns for Games Decor Craft-ivities

This has over 66 pages of a tasty assortment of templates and patterns for craftivities, rewards, incentives, celebrations, as well as suggestions for using all of them! Binder or journal cover designs and name tags, and labels are also included. What a way to decorate your storage boxes! You may want to study how ice cream is made...this is a perfect supplement. You may want to have your kids build their own sundae...a craftivity that's sure to please. Follow up with a procedure writing piece. They probably won't balk at writing about their super sundae they created themselves....Then why not have a REAL ice cream party?

 Lots and lots of possibilities--and of course, these can be used year after year. This is not a clip art set, but the pattern pieces can be reduced or enlarged as needed. Great for hands on, fine motor work--cutting, and coloring, and assembling a double, triple, or quadruple cone!

Teachers and parents--you can print out the sets of multiple graphics, and write in your own (by hand) math facts, or sight words.Turn the ice cream cones into flash cards for any subject. Create a memory game with them, by printing a double set.

The ice cream themed writing papers encourage narrative, opinion, and other writing. Have kids compare and contrast flavors....theirs versus their friends' flavors?

Guaranteed to help cool you down! Thank you for stopping by...and enjoy your summer if you're up north where I am!! :D

All work is copyrighted by Karen at Growing Smart Readers

Introduce Narrative Writing with Folktales

Free Printable: Write a Little Folktale

Feel free to go to my teacher store and look up this free resource if your kids are just getting into writing folktales. It includes a cloze (that is cloze-not close) writing activity, a controlled framework for writing a story. It also has a word bank for them to refer to. It's a good start for those hesitant writers.

Writing
My kids love to write, but they're all over the place when they write. I am always and forever trying to figure out how to get them to write creatively but in an organized manner. Reading folktales is a fun and easy way to teach them the structure of a simple narrative. The folktale formula can help even struggling writers get a good storyline down.

First kids need to read and hear several folktales. They might notice on their own how they seem like such "old" stories, timeless, and written with patterns, and how often things come in three's. They need to make connections, see the patterns and similarities between the different tales. Then prewriting begins.

First, they plan their characters (animals or people), a setting (Once upon a time, or Long ago, in a forest, in a cottage, etc.), a simple problem (usually involving bad vs good), and a solution (in which everyone lives happily ever after). Add details to the story, (whether 3 characters, 3 problems, or 3 events) plus a little lesson learned at the end, and the sense of timelessness (no specific time or place). This is the stuff of which folktales are made. Fairytales, by contrast, involve royalty.

From this point, you can take your kids in any direction...from final drafts, to oral storytelling, to creating class books, puppet skits, dioramas, and so much more.

I find that folktales, fairytales, and fables really sync together --and right around December seems to the right time in the school year.