The Little Red Hen

I CANNOT believe that school is out in less than 3 weeks now! I'm sad and excited at the same time! I guess it could also be that I feel like I"m living in Seattle, Washington with ALL THIS RAIN! I cannot believe it even snowed this week! It's almost the end of May for heck's sake!

Check out those skinny "straw" legs!

Anyway, I"m on a reader's theater kick. We did Jack and the Beanstalk last week LINK HERE and this week we are doing The Little Red Hen.  I found a cute script for it online at HERE at Joanne's wikispace. and then I found some puppets for the story and made copies and blew them up for each student to do a set of 4.

                                                      
 Afterwards I realized the animals don't match to the reader's theater. So I just used a white out pen and changed out the characters of the  pig and duck  to the mouse and cat throughout the story on my copy of the reader's theater.  Then I made copies for all the kids to read it too. They LOVED reading and acting out the parts. I gave each table a character to read chorally.


Some other readers theaters can be found at the Grandview Library. Some of them are illustrated. The link is HERE for Reader's Theaters.

I had some big, white stickers we used for eyes...the kids added black dots inside...and I had cute "chick"
illustrated paper for them to write on and color for their final copy. We went through the whole writing process. 

They made puppets by coloring them and cutting them out. Then we taped popsicle sticks to the backs. While they were doing their puppets I read them a VERSION of the little red hen in rhyme. It is called The Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizza)  It is a funny story where she is actually making a pizza and all the animals are doing funny things like listening to boom boxes and laying out by the pool on a chaise lounge.  We will compare and contrast the stories when we are done with both the reader's theater version and the book version. I had no idea there were so many out there!!

Venn Diagram of the 2 Stories of Little Red Hen

                                

Andrew, Trace and Vera...painting party....

My kids are really good at using expression and getting into doing character voices. It's such a cute story. And as we were getting into the readers theater  I thought about how fun it would have been to bring in some homemade bread dough and have the cafeteria ladies bake it for us! Super FUN! (too bad I didn't think of it sooner! duh!)

Then after sloppy copies, editing, they wrote their final copies and colored illustrated paper. 

This story reminds us all to jump into things and be assertive, even when others around us are not helpful.  We can be independent thinkers, movers, shakers, just like the RED HEN!  I think we will do this for next week's art and drama rotation!I think the other first graders will love it too.

Then we painted LITTLE RED HENS!  Here's Emma and Addie painting their hens....

We painted paper plates red and added white sticker eyes, a yellow beak, wings and a feather on top. The legs are drinking straws and we added little hen feet to the bendy part of the straws. They turned out ridiculous looking but funny. pick a peck a....cheep cheep cheep! 

Peter's funny Red Hen story... Lots of kids had dialogue with quotation marks....yeah
that is not my favorite thing to have to edit....snicker....

Instead of doing a retell I gave the kids this assignment; REWRITE the Little Red Hen in some way. Change the food she was making, make one of the characters come and help her, or finish the story in a little different way. We had the hen making spagetti, cinnamon rolls, chocolate chip cookies and meatball pizza. These stories are going to be hilarious. Much more fun than a simple retell...

Wacky Red Hen bulletin board....with our funny stories....I LOVED them ALL! 

Next  we'll do the Stinky Cheese Man!   It's actually my favorite. The story....not stinky cheese...hehe