David Slonim is coming 

By: Amy L. Cellar, Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio

Book Used: You Think It’s Easy Being the Tooth Fairy?

Grade Level Indicator: Summarizing using main idea and supporting details

o   Standard #3: Reading Process- Concepts of Print, Comprehension Strategies, and Self-Monitoring Strategies Standard.

o   Grade Level Indicator: #4 – Summarize Text, sequencing information accurately and include main ideas and details as appropriate

Grade: 3^rd

Activity:

            My teacher and I decided to use You Think It’s Easy Being the Tooth Fairy? for this project. I read the book aloud to the children. We stopped at different places in the book to talk about some important things, such as whether it would be hard to keep away from the pets, or if the tooth fairy had to be smart to make all of her inventions, as well as other important details of the book.

            After I read the book, I gave the children each a piece of paper that had lines for them to cut on and fold on. It turned into a three-section display with flaps that folded down. At the top, the children wrote the main idea of the story, which was “It is not easy to be the tooth fairy”, or something very similar, based on the child. Then on the folded flap of each section, the children wrote different supporting details. One detail they may have wrote was “It was hard to try and avoid pets”. Then, the child would fold down the flap, and illustrate (because David Slonim was the illustrator J) whatever that detail was (they would draw a picture of the tooth fairy avoiding pets, for example). They did this on each of the three flaps, so that their entire project represented a main idea and three supporting details.

Student Reaction:

            The children absolutely loved the book. The illustrations really did add something extra to the book for the children to enjoy, and they really did. Some of their favorite parts of the book were the tooth that the tooth fairy traveled on, lifting quarters for weights, the floss on her belt, and the tooth bed that she slept in. However, their favorite part was on the back end page, where Travis is sleeping, they noticed that he is cuddling with the blue guy from He Came With the Couch. They just thought that was the coolest thing ever.

            They really liked the activity, and they agreed that it was perfect to use pictures for our project, since David Slonim was the illustrator of the book. It was something more creative than their typical group brainstorming and teacher modeling of summarizing, main idea, and details. They got excited about it, and some children wanted to spend all morning working on their project. A lot of them got really into it, and wanted to see the actual book over and over again to give them inspiration in their own drawings. Overall, I thought that it went really well, especially considering the time that was allowed for the activity.