I was recently chatting with a librarian friend of mine about Elephant and Piggy books by Mo Willems. I am HUGE fan of Elephant and Piggy books and am always looking for a new way to use them. If you do not know what I am talking about you need to run (not walk) to your nearest library and start borrowing the collection- they are so good I would even say skip the library and head straight to the book store!
What's nice about Piggy and Elephant is that each character speaks in an assigned colored bubble, pink for Piggy and blue-grey for Elephant (who sometimes goes by Gerald). My librarian friend told me that she uses the ELMO (you can use a document camera, or a laptop camera if you are really stretched for supplies) to project the books and have the classes read along. She sits half of the class on one side of the projector and the other on the other side. She then assigns a character to each side of the rug. Occasionally, there will be a character other than Piggy or Elephant who has a random colored bubble, which she reads.
The books take about 5-7 minutes to read, despite the high page count the word count is relatively low. The stories are adorable and enjoyable for both children and adults. While picking a favorite is a challenge (since I love them all) I would have to say, my personal favorite is Today I Will Fly.
One more thought on this: The year that I taught 3-year-olds they noticed that the word 'monday' and the word 'mo' started with the same two letters. Once the surprise of this discovery settled, we made an official decision to make Mondays 'Mo Mondays' and chose to read a new 'Mo book' every Monday. Mo Mondays were much anticipated and totally fantastic!
Here is a link to a great 'Piggy and Elephant Party Pack,' complete with activities for both home and classroom. http://www.pigeonpresents.com/teachersguides/eandp_eventkit_09.pdf
Happy reading!
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