The Mitten

This week for Large Group we read the book The Mitten by Jan Brett.  This is a book about a boy named Nicki who wants his grandma to make him mittens that are as white as snow.  It isn't long before Nicki loses his white mitten in the white snow and it becomes a warm home to some animals.  The story ends with the bear getting tickled by the mouse's whiskers and letting out a HUGE sneeze.  This sneeze sends the animals and the mitten flying through the air.  When Nicki finds his mitten it has been stretched and pulled and is bigger than his other mitten.

We all loved this story.  We learned that if you look on the side of each page, there is a picture that gives us a hint of what will be happening next.  We talked about the animals in the book and used descriptive words to describe them.  We made predictions as to what we thought would happen next and we even drew some conclusions about what happened based on the pictures we were looking at.  We talked about mittens and how they help us.  We sequenced which animal went into the mitten first and which animal went into the mitten last.  We talked about which animal was the biggest animal and which animal was the smallest animal.

We played a game where we pretended that a large sheet laid out on the floor was a huge mitten and we were the animals looking for a warm place to go.  When teacher Heidi said the name of our animal, we crawled in the mitten.  We had to squeeze so that everyone fit inside.  The mouse was the last to go in the mitten and then we all let out a big A-A-A-Choo and the sheet flew off all of the animals.  

When we were finished with the BIG mitten, we put all of our animals back inside a big paper mitten that teacher Heidi had.  We listened for our animals and as we put in in, we sang this song to the tune of Farmer in the Dell.

The (name of animal) squeezes in the (name of animal) squeezes in;

Help us please so we don't freeze,

The (name of animal) squeezes in.

You can read the book The Mitten at home by checking it out from the library or you can watch an online version by going to YouTube and searching Online Storytime: The Mitten.