So, yesterday was the official kick-off of the Keep Portland Weird festival here in Paris, which meant that I had a reading/screening in the...
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This is an amazing book to inspire children's curiosity...I taught a class of 1st and 2nd graders, many considered "at-risk", in a special summer school enrichment program to enhance reading and math skills. I used the rainforest as our theme, and each child chose an animal to research. One day I shared Actual Size, and immediately children were ASKING to learn about the size of their chosen rainforest animal. They searched through books and the internet for information. In the classroom, we walked off the 36 feet of the longest-recorded anaconda, measured the length of the jaguar's tail, the wingspan of the Blue Morpho butterfly...children asked to cut out "actual size" examples for their display boards, found other objects that were the actual size of whatever they had measured for their animal, and compared thier animal sizes with one another. "Mine's bigger, twice as big!" (And they didn't even know they were doing math or improving their reading!)
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Actual Size by Steve Jenkins
macwell, January 3, 2010
This is an amazing book to inspire children's curiosity...I taught a class of 1st and 2nd graders, many considered "at-risk", in a special summer school enrichment program to enhance reading and math skills. I used the rainforest as our theme, and each child chose an animal to research. One day I shared Actual Size, and immediately children were ASKING to learn about the size of their chosen rainforest animal. They searched through books and the internet for information. In the classroom, we walked off the 36 feet of the longest-recorded anaconda, measured the length of the jaguar's tail, the wingspan of the Blue Morpho butterfly...children asked to cut out "actual size" examples for their display boards, found other objects that were the actual size of whatever they had measured for their animal, and compared thier animal sizes with one another. "Mine's bigger, twice as big!" (And they didn't even know they were doing math or improving their reading!)(1 of 2 readers found this comment helpful)