This is one of those
great McCracken
books. It is a
repetitive pattern story
about a horse who
wanted to reach an
apple. He couldn't
reach it so he called a
number of other
animal characters to
help him. Finally the
horse gets his apple!
Here's the address for
McCracken:
McCracken Educational
Services
P.O. Box 3588
Blaine, WA 98231-3588
They've got tons of
fun, appropriate
poems, chants,
stories, songs, etc.
Shared Reading:
day 1:
make predictions using the front/back cover, introduce
book, title, author, and illustrator, then read for
enjoyment!
day 2:
reread the book with the children, focus their attention
on new vocabulary
day 3:
reread the book with the children, focus on print
conventions
We reviewed on directionality and return sweep. We
"predicted" which character Horse would call next by
focusing on the first letter/initial sound.
day 4:
reread the book with the children, experimenting with
intonation and expression, focus on same/further print
conventions or language targets
We focused on the high-frequency word "it," highlighting it
with highlighting tape.
day 5:
reread and respond (responses can be oral, written,
or visual, depending on the shared reading book)
We decided to retell the story using different characters.
We voted on the top 4 animals and broke into "character
committees". Each committee created a "stuffed" (butcher
paper) animal character to attach to our class tree. Then
we ordered them from largest to smallest (just like the
story), hot-glued them to the tree, rewrote the story (using
our characters and the McCracken story pattern) on
sentence strips, and hot-glued the strips to the animals.
Now we have our own "The Big Red Apple" to read
whenever we want!