not a box

Why are you in a box?

It is not a box!

First we read the book Not A Box. The Kindergarteners made connections, talking with a partner about what they would pretend their cardboard box would be; a boat, a unicorn, a house, a rocket ship...

Then they took on the role of word detective and noticed the middle sounds in the words not and box; /o/. Using what children heard, we played with words with that same middle vowel sound. We built silly words using ox as our rime, because there aren't many words we know that end with x!

We continued our work with words with the /o/ sound in the middle through a new word family book. All of the words in our new book end with the rime og and the Kindergarteners listened for and recorded different beginning sounds.

Not A Box has repeating sentences full of words that we know! These sentences have new sounds and words, too. We studied the six words in one of the sentences from the book.

Why  are  you  in  a  box ?

The children found words they know; in and a. They used sound power to read the word box and checked the picture on the message. They noticed a digraph, wh. They noticed a question mark at the end! We circled, underlined and highlighted all of our noticings, using these observations to figure out the sentence together. Then we reread it again and again.

We pointed and reread the sentence like a question, just like we heard in the book!

Then the children got their own sentence strip and blank canvas. They reread the sentence (again!) and cut out each word, carefully putting the words in order to build the sentence. They checked their work, using pointer power, sound power, and sight word power. We can use our reading powers when we build a sentence during Fundations!

Finally they used picture power to draw a picture connected to their sentence. We used the same style as the author and illustrator of Not A Box. 

Our next step will be to read and build the answer to the question; It is not a box!