la moufle

Mitten animals word strips (printable)
Puppets, sequencing, texture experiment (printable)
We Give Books online version of The Mitten (teacher must narrate in French)

La moufle

The Mitten by Jan Brett

We began a unit today based on Jan Brett's story "Nicki et les animaux de l'hiver"  (The Mitten).  After polling each child about which animals they had actually seen in real life (someone had held a hedgehog) we found that the most unknown animal was the badger.  Tomorrow I plan to ask, which animal do you think might be the most vicious (I am trying to engage my boy audience here)?  Once they make their choice we will watch this bit of a National Geographic video.  

I have had difficulty ordering Jan Brett's version of this story in French.  I recently discovered that there are other versions available.  Our journal sentence structure this month is "Qui, Quoi, Où".  We identified these elements in The Mitten and the story La Moufle.  We discussed the owner, the item, the animal and the catastrophe.

  

  

We discussed what item belongs in what kind of setting.  The mitten and the animals in the story belong in a winter setting.  A cowboy hat would belong on a farm, a seashell on a beach. We will revisit our ideas when we write our own stories based on the mitten.  It was helpful to hear from Jan  Brett and how she writes and illustrates a book.

We made puppets of the animals in the mitten.  We sequenced them according to the order they appear in the story and we categorized them based on their textures as we are learning about the sense of touch in our science unit.  

My son told me today that when his class retells the story with their puppets, when they get to the part where the bear sneezes, they get to throw all of their puppets up in the air!

Next week, we plan to stitch up our own mittens.  We practiced a whip stitch on the kindergarten lacing cards today.  There was some nostalgia among my students whom I taught in kindergarten.  Madame?  Do you remember we did this at centres in maternelle madame?!