Goldfinch Book Pairing

All of our K - 2 students participate in voting for the Iowa Goldfinch Award in March, so we take time at the start of the new year to read aloud as many nominees as we can. A recent pairing of nominees was The Story of Fish & Snail by Deborah Freedman with Should I Share My Ice Cream? by Mo Willems.

Both books feature friends who tell the story, and both feature decision making. Elephant and Piggie are long-time favorites of our students, and they were excited to meet Fish and Snail once we shared that the pairs are similar. 

After reading The Story of Fish & Snail, we talked about bravery and moments when we have been brave ourselves. Using the hashtag #BeBrave, students shared personal stories of bravey, which then became part of a display.

This display also included a word cloud generated from student responses to the question, "Where can someone show their bravery?" 

Second graders took to Padlet to record their thinking about times in their own lives when they've shown bravery.

Our work wasn't exclusively about bravery; we also approached Should I Share My Ice Cream? from that approach that everyone has a favorite flavor, so students designed their own ice cream scoops so we could put our "ice cream cones" in a display as well.

Stay tuned for more Iowa Goldfinch Award book pairings and examples of student work!

A Quick Follow-Up:

Usually, we post our blog updates on Twitter and link the new post to the tweet so others can see what's happening in our libraries. After doing so for this post, author Deborah Freedman replied to us!