One Cool (Iowa Goldfinch!) Friend

Another of the Iowa Goldfinch nominated books for the year is One Cool Friend by Toni Buzzeo and David Small.

After picture-walking a few pages of the story, we moved to the digital story that was available to use through our AEA's digital library.

As a follow-up activity, we went to PebbleGO to read and listen to some nonfiction texts about penguins.

Students then completed exit tickets to place on our classroom penguin. Their task was to write a fact they learned from the reading or to share one thing they thought was interesting about penguins.

Our classroom penguin has quite a lot of information on him--check it out!

I Want my Hat Back Activity

One of the year's Goldfinch nominees is I Want my Hat Back by Jon Klassen.




We paired this nominee with another Goldfinch book--Exclamation Mark by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Our discussions focused on how authors and illustrators let us know we might read their books out loud by the words the choose, the pictures they draw, and the punctuation marks they include.



After reading the book and talking about how the characters might sound when they responded to Bear's question ("Have you seen my hat?"), students chose their own animals and made their own hats. All of our hat-wearing animals have found a place for themselves in our landscapes--check them out!

Below are some of the students proudly showing off their animals and hats.