Kitten's First Full Moon Lessons - Mrs. Russell's Room

Hello all…
It’s been a really busy, and creative time for me professionally. I’ve been teaching a series of lessons from a literacy unit I created on the first grade exemplar text Kitten’s First Full Moon. I would like to create a set of lessons for each of the texts, but, not all of them are developmentally appropriate at this time of the year, so, I am using other books that I like, that have skills that I need to teach, that are also within the lexile band prescribed by my district for first grade.
Whenever I am teaching a non-fiction topic, I like to make sure that I have lots of books both fiction and non to share with the students to pique interest. Here’s a few of the books that I read with my students during this study.

My process was pretty simple, I typed up the story so that I could mark the text for things that I found meaningful, such as derivational & inflectional endings, figurative language, rhyming patterns, story elements and just my over all impressions. It was a lot of fun to break down. I also decided to add a close text analysis for this particular unit.

I typed up parts of the story that I thought were impactful. I used those portions of the text with the students. We re-read them several times and marked them for sound patterns, etc. All told, I came up with four lessons and a writing extension.

So far, it’s going really well in my class. I’m excited about how the children are responding to it. I like really explicit plans, so, this is what I put together for Day One. The other days have different activities. The format of the lesson allows me to chunk things down into digestible bites for my kiddos. Some years, a single days lesson went into two days, but to me that’s okay if my kids are getting deep with the learning.