Creepy Carrots Cause and Effect and Summarizing

I love using picture books to teach a comprehension skill. It is so much more intriguing and "fun," for students than to base activities out of their basal reader. We use Reading Street for our weekly concepts, but I'm not exactly sure when the last time was that I took an activity out of the teacher's manual to teach the comprehension, grammar, writing, or phonics skills for the week. That's why I love being able to use resources from fellow teachers and to create them myself - because I know the needs of my students and how to tailor activities to help them understand.

This past week, the concepts we needed to cover were summarizing and cause and effect.
My Scholastic book order had just come in with my purchase of Creepy Carrots by Aaron Reynolds. I had bought the book because two weeks prior I had purchased Anita Goodwin's Creepy Carrot pack which you can find here. That's the first time I purchased a resource BEFORE seeing the book, but it was too cute!

To practice summarizing, I read the book to them once in the beginning of the week. I re-read it to them two days later and together we came up with ideas to fill in the beginning, middle, and end graphic organizer.

After students filled out the organizer, they had to take those ideas and create a paragraph on the final copy summarizing sheet. Their favorite part was to make Creepy Carrots at the end and it kept them motivated! I love Anita's pack.

The second skill we needed to cover was cause and effect. To reinforce this concept, after practicing it with real life examples, some other short books, etc. students had to match up causes and effects from the book.

I created this quick cause and effect flap book. It can be done in an interactive notebook OR on a piece of construction paper like I have here. There are four causes numbered 1-4. Students have to find the matching effect, and then glue them in order under the cause-effect flaps.

Next week, I am going to have them write their own, "Creepy....." story. They can choose something to make creepy and create a funny and unique story on this template.

You can grab the cause and effect and writing template HERE.  Enjoy!!