Our shared reading poem of the week is "Let's Build a Snowman". The first day I drew a snowman step by step-EXACTLY as the students instructed me. Needless to say the snowman originally had a nose on the top of his head (they said on top!!!) and a smile where his feet should be. While this activity made for a wildly good time, students were also introduced to the importance of being specific.
Next we read the poem and had to figure out what words were missing. We learned about the word PREDICTION and that it was a fancy word for a good guess. Our discussion also included appropriate predictions vs silly or inappropriate predictions and using context of the story poem and the words.
After the first two predictions the first letter of the word was revealed and we saw which of our predictions made sense with that additional clue...sometimes we had to make entirely new predictions.
Our follow up activity included making snowmen out of marshmallows