Mrs. Goudie's First Grade Class

Snow Bear By Jean Craighead George Hello from Mrs. Goudie's first grade class at Anna Kyle School in Fairfield, California. We have been so excited to participate in this year's Frosty Reader's Project We have read Snow Bear by Jean Craighead George. We won't give the story away, but I will tell you we did a number of fun activities. After reading the story we created graphic organizers to tell WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE....Using graphic organizers is part of California State Standards for first grade in Language Arts. When you read a book you can find connections to in all subject matter fields. We discussed polar bears and why they were white. Did you know that polar bears are white because it is an effective camouflage? It's true. We did an art project to prove this point. We glued white die cut polar bears onto a piece of white art paper. The polar bear blended right in. Next we took those neato bingo daubers and stamped all over the page. After taking off the polar bear die cut, we discovered it was much easier to see the polar bear now that he's not in a snowy environment.

Another activity we did was to discuss what happened in the story in terms of verbs. Some of the verbs we found connected to this story were sliding, rolling, smiling, running and many other great action words.You can play a game at the Quia site we created about Snow Bear.

California State Standards for Language Arts in First Grade

2.0 Reading Comprehension
Students read and understand grade-level-appropriate material. They draw upon a variety of comprehension strategies as needed (e.g., generating and responding to essential questions, making predictions, comparing information from several sources). The selections in Recommended Readings in Literature, Kindergarten Through Grade Eight illustrate the quality and complexity of the materials to be read by students. In addition to their regular school reading, by grade four, students read one-half million words annually, including a good representation of grade-level-appropriate narrative and expository text (e.g., classic and contemporary literature, magazines, newspapers, online information). In grade one, students begin to make progress toward this goal.

Structural Features of Informational Materials
2.1 Identify text that uses sequence or other logical order.

Comprehension and Analysis of Grade-Level-Appropriate Text
2.2 Respond to who, what, when, where, and how questions.
2.3 Follow one-step written instructions.
2.4 Use context to resolve ambiguities about word and sentence meanings.
2.5 Confirm predictions about what will happen next in a text by identifying key words (i.e., signpost words).
2.6 Relate prior knowledge to textual information.
2.7 Retell the central ideas of simple expository or narrative passages.