Katie Powers, Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio

            He Came with the Couch is a favorite book of mine that David Slonim wrote.  I decided to choose that book for an activity in my kindergarten classroom.  For this activity I focused on the Ohio content standard for writing applications.  The indicator used was #1-dictate or write simple stories, using letters, words or pictures.  I began my lesson by reading the book in an interactive read aloud.  I asked the children questions about the story and we talked about the person on the couch.  I then had the children go back to their seats and handed them a paper with a couch on it.  They were to draw their own creature on the couch and tell a story of something the creature did.  Because they cannot write words yet, I had them try to write the beginning sounds and later dictate the story to me.

            This story was already read to the children in the library, but they were still excited to hear it again and pointed out many things they enjoyed about it.  The children really enjoyed creating their own creature to sit on the couch.  They wanted them to be perfect and some even started all over because they didn’t like how they looked.  A lot of them even named their creature and had me spell out the name for them so that they could write them on their papers.  Some of the stories that the students dictated to me were very long and they were able to point to each letter that they made showing what word it represented.  Overall, I think that the students really enjoyed the book and were excited about being able to draw and write a story about their own creature.