A Brand New Favorite!

Gist:

This book is a take off of the song There Were Ten In The Bed And The Little One Said Roll Over...only here there are 10 on a sled, actually a toboggan and they are arctic animals having a blast flying down a snow covered hill.

Why I Love It:

• Liza Woodruff's illustrations are brrr-illiant! Very colorful and the fact that the animals riding on the sled are artic or wintry animals add to the story; they too, are extremely adorable. My personal favorite is the moose.
• It's hilarious!  Your students will be giggling as the "wolf wipes out" and the caribou yells: "Great thunder duck under!" as they go careening under a huge pine tree! The illustrations add to the fun and frolic and you almost feel like you're on the sled, or at least wish you'd get a turn to ride with these cute characters.
  
• It's a rhyming book, and since that's one of my report card standards and so important in teaching reading it makes it all the more special. My Y5's love rhyming books.  To exercise their brains and increase their skills, I pause in my reading and let them guess the rhyming word.  They really do extremely well with this and enjoy this "guessing game" activity.  I think it makes reading the book more fun too.
• The book also has great alliterative words when the animals go flying off the sled. i.e. the sheep shot out, the fox flipped out etc. I like to do tongue twisting activities with my students and often use alliterative phrases involving animals.
• It's a nice addition to my collection of January books that help me take my students "somewhere" so that I can teach a mini-geography lesson when we go on our "magic carpet ride" to the setting in the book.  Here the last run "...is in the moonlit land of the midnight sun." So we get a chance to discuss what that means as well.

Story Telling Tips: 

• Although more than just Alaska can be considered the land of the midnight sun, it's one of the places I choose to show my students because it's part of the United States.  As mentioned above I incorporate a geography lesson with with the reading of the story.
• After the story, I choose 10 of my students to sit in a line behind each other as if they were on a sled.  The rest of us chant: "There were 10 on the sled and the caribou said 'We're gliding, start sliding.' So they all slid over and 1 fell off.   The child on the end of the sled rolls off and then we continue the song... "There were 9 on the sled and the caribou said..." Another child rolls off and we continue 'til only the caribou is left and then we choose another 10 "animals" to sit on the sled until everyone has had a turn.
• I made color copies of each of the animals as they rolled off the sled, laminated them and put a scratchy dot of Velcro on the back of each piece.  I pass the animals out to my students, and as we read the story and the animals fly off the sled, I have them place them on the sled on my flannel board.  After we're done reading the story, I take the animals off the sled and see if my students can sequence which animal fell off first etc. 

Art Activity: Ted On A Sled

• Run off copies of the bear on brown-colored construction paper and have your students cut out their bear.
• To make it more of a keepsake, I Xerox my students' class photo and cut them into an oval shape.  They glue the picture to the center of their teddy's face and then glue their teddy bear onto their sled so that he is sitting on the end of it. (There's a tab for this.)
  
• Cut 2-inch wide strips out of all different colors of construction paper to make toboggans from extra large sheets of construction paper.
• After students have glued their teddy to the end of the sled help them write their name with Elmer's glue and then sprinkle on the glitter of their choice.  You could also use glitter glue. 
• Set aside to dry and then have children roll the opposite end of their toboggan on a pencil gently uncurling it so that their teddy bear really looks like he's sitting on a curved sled.
• I staple white batting that I've cut to look like sloping snow hills on a long bulletin board, and then staple the teds on a sled in all different positions sliding down the hills.
• Click here for the Bear Pattern