The Grinch That Stole Christmas- Beginning, Middle & End

This week we have been reading all about How The Grinch Stole Christmas. I have to take a minute to thank Ms. H, for giving us our very own Grinch to have with us in our class! It is one of my FAVORITE Christmas stories, so I have been reading it with ALL my classes. I decided that I would work on a beginning, middle and end story tree with my Kindergartners.

On Monday we learned Deanna's wonderful Mr. Grinch song, from her mini Grinch unit. Which the kids loved because they already knew the Jingle Bells tune. We discussed some vocabulary words like mean, scowling, grew and heart.

On Tuesday, we read the book, while looking for one of our vocabulary words of the week, "go". We found it! Then we talked about what made the Grinch's heart grow.

Today, Wednesday, we made a beginning, middle & end story tree. I had seen several Kindergarten blogs out there that do them. They look wonderful and I thought it would be a piece of cake. Boy was I wrong. I started with a big sheet of bulletin board paper. I printed up the title and labels for the beginning, middle & end. Next, I had my students come up with sentences, that I then wrote and had them copy. Big mistake # 1, they had a very difficult time with this. Then we had to decide if that sentence went in the beginning, middle or end of our tree, big mistake #2. We did not get to finish as a group. I had to finish it up during my plan.

You see what I wanted to measure/ show, was if my students could identify the beginning, middle & end of a story. However, my students were hung up on their handwriting and too WAY too long to write up their sentence strips. Therefore I did not get to assess what I really wanted to assess. I should have known better but I was too caught up in the activity to realize the big road block in my way.

Fortunately, I have two Kindergarten classes, so I had a chance to make up for my mistakes. During my plan I rethought through my lesson. For my next group, I printed up some sentences, almost directly from the story book. The students had to trace the words, after I read them aloud. Next, we concentrated on if our sentence was a part of the story that went at the beginning, middle, or end of our story. Them we glued them on to our tree. This lesson went much smoother. For sentences click here.

Tomorrow, we are going to make a Grinch mask and act out what the Grinch was like at the start of the story and, the end of the story. Then draw about it. I got the mask from www.seussville.com. However, I have it uploaded to Google Docs and you can get it here.

Finally, on Friday, we will conclude our Grinch study by watching the movie!