Third graders have been reading a few " clever strong girl" books with a few old favorites mixed in. Happy Like Soccer is a new book in which city-kid Sierra makes a plan with Coach Marco so her auntie, who works on Saturdays, can finally come see a game. Author Maribeth Boelts also wrote the discussion-spurring picture book Those Shoes. Clever Beatrice is set in upper peninsula of Michigan, near the Canadian border (so we talked a bit about geography around the Great Lakes). Ask your daughter how Beatrice outsmarted the Giant. This book reminded us of Jack and the Beanstalk. Old favorites included Bernard Waber's Ira Sleeps Over and Fred Marcellino's I, Crocodile (a nice link between Egypt and France). We are now reading a couple of books by Tomi Ungerer, including the mystical Fog Island (was it just a dream?).
Third graders have become experts at the Thesaurus Game. They are told the part of speech and how many strands of synonyms the word has. They listen to all the synonyms and guess the original word. We will continue to expand our vocabulary and stretch our brains with this thesaurus "work".
