Using Caldecotts Across the Curriculum

This book offers a variety of cross-curricular activities to creat unit studies on Caldecott books. It includes units on 19 different Caldecott winners : Make Way for Ducklings The Little Island Finders Keepers A Tree is Nice Once a Mouse The Snowy Day Arrow to the Sun Why Mosquitos Buzz in People's Ears Ox-Cart Man Fables The Glorious Flight Saint George and the Dragon Owl Moon Song and Dance Man Lon Po Po Mirrette on the High Wire Grandfather's Journey Smoky Night Officer Buckle and Gloria The book starts out with an overview of the goals as well as general ideas and enrichment activities to use for all titles. With each book, it follows a similar format of a 1 page overview showing a photo of the book cover with a short overview and selected quote followed by about 4 or 5 pages of activity ideas. Activites include (usually) one art activity, "book talk", "writers corner" and activities in math, social studies, science, and sometimes additional language arts (usually about 1 paragraph on each subject.) This varies by the book- not all books have all categories. Some books have ideas for movement activities or dramatic play ideas. The activites given are good ones that you can actually use. As a random example, for "The Snowy Day" the art ideas include making a collage; movement activity for moving like snowflakes, science activities on animal tracks & and snowball melting, and language arts sequencing activities (no math on this one!) The activities are well thought out and have detailed descriptions. If you're familiar with the Five and Row series, it's a similar format, although I think this book has more useful activities as compared to just discussion ideas. Would also be a good choice for home-schoolers. This book will work well for the classroom teacher, it will actually be used for more than one idea and is worth purchasing if you plan on using a few of the titles above. You may also like the Literature Pockets: Caldecott Winners, Grades 1-3 (which has more reproducible activities.) I'm glad I selected this one, it will be well used.