What in the Wild?

What in the Wild?  Mysteries of Nature Concealed...and Revealed

Poems by David M. Schwartz and Yael Schy, photos by Dwight Kuhn

Published by Random House Children's Books Copyright 2010

 

Unique Reading Experience

Fully engaging

Brings Out Your Inner Detective 

A Fun Read

Surprises in Every Page

• Suggested Delivery
•  Read Aloud

• Reading Level
• Lexile score - NC1000L

Want to Learn More:

Author David M. Schwartz website

http://davidschwartz.com/

Interactive E-Books by Dwight Kuhn, as well as David and Brian Kuhn

http://kuhnphoto.com/

In this book there a few words that you would want to teach in order for the student to fully comprehend the material, these words include; sickle, hypodermic needles,elaborate, forelimbs, roost, burrows, and hefty.  The definitions which I altered slightly from dictionary.com are as follow:

• Sickle: 
• a tool for cutting grain, grass, etc., consisting of a curved, hook-like blade held in a short handle
• hypodermic: 
• Releases drugs under the skin
• Elaborate: 
• Made with great care and very detailed
• Forelimb:
• A front limb on an animal
• Roost
• A high place where birds rest at night
• Burrows
• A hole in the ground made by a small animal to live in as a home
• Hefty
• Heavy

A great way to teach this to the class is to set up a before, during, and after reading strategy, after thinking hard on it I came up with these three reading strategies for any instance where you would use this book in a lesson

1. Before the reading begins ask the students if they've ever seen animals before at the zoo or in their own backyard and have them come up with 10-15 animals that they've seen before.  This will help engage them into the topic as well as draw their interest into reading the book about animals
2. During the reading of the book, if you're doing it as a whole class reading write on the board each animal name as it appears and ask the students to come up with three things they learned about the animal in a web format, these don't have to be full sentences, but will serve as a way to cement the new animal into their brain so that they remember what they learned about it.
3. After the students have completed the readings break them into small groups by animal and have the students create a small presentation about the animal for the class.  For this activity they can use drawings on the projector, make a skit about the animal, or even sing a song about the animal, if you want to add technology you can have them use blabberize.com to make an image of the animal give the presentation to the class.  Try to encourage them to do something that isn't just reading the information to the class as this will help exercise their creativity.

If students do the reading independently or if you want to re-introduce the book on a different day you can also add in this writing activity that will really test their inferential comprehension of the text:

• Have the students each go to their desks and pick one animal that they want to write about, then have them imagine what a day in their animals shoes (or claws, or talons, or whatever) would be like.  Then have them write about that day, when would they wake up?  Where would they get food?  What do they do if they see a predator?  What do they do if they have babies?  What do they do for fun?  This gives them the opportunity to use what they've learned about their animal to infer the behind the scenes part of the animal's life and to apply what they're learning and see the impact of a reading and how it teaches them the life of their animal.