In January, I love teaching the story “The Mitten” by Jan Brett & Alvin Tresselt, and “The Hat” by Brett. During this unit we focus on comparing and contrasting amongst many other things.
Many people have never heard the story by Alvin Tresselt but I believe it is the original mitten story. You can find it at Amazon..Click Here!
We begin our unit by reading Jan Brett’s version. We sequence the story and then design our own mittens. We pretend like we lost one of them and work on a descriptive writing piece. Sometimes we watercolor and crayon resist the mittens but this year we just used construction paper. They turn out cute either way!
Another focus for our week was learning what a passage is. To make this relatable to our mitten stories, I wrote two mitten passages. On this day we read the passage title “The Mitten” (original I know).
I also have a reader’s theater script which is super fun to complete with your class.
On the second day, we read “The Mitten” by Alvin Tresselt. After reading this text, we work on comparing the two with a Venn Diagram and with a sorting activity I made. Check them out below.
Then we read the “Paired Passage” title Mittens. We do a little predicting and of course they think it is about mittens. This time, it is about a cat. We use highlighters to find our text evidence as you can see below.
As an extension of our mitten theme, we work on synonyms. This is our language skill for the week and it pairs nicely with the theme. We web words and create our matching mittens.
There is a reader’s theater script for the Tresselt book as well.
Next up is “The Hat”. For this text we reviewed main idea and detail. Then we focused on our passage, The Hat.
For writing we made hats and wrote a descriptive piece on our hats. Check out some of these cuties.
Here is a snap shot of “The Hat” reader’s theater. Each one comes with the script and colorful signs the students can wear. It is fun to have three different stories practiced in your own class and then they share them with each other.
We had a great week using these amazing stories. I hope you could grab a few ideas for your classroom.
