WI Golden Archer Awards - Week Four - A Ball for Daisy

Week four of the WI Golden Archer Awards program brings my groups to A Ball for Daisy by Chris Raschka.  This book was the 2012 Caldecott Medal winner.  I chose to do this book next so that we could practice our new skill of reading wordless books.  Students remembered right away to not cheat by looking ahead at the pictures to come on the page.  This is especially important for the climax of this story. 

As a follow up activity for A Ball for Daisy, I chose to have students divide their paper into four parts and draw a wordless story of their own.  In most classes, the telling of the story took 20 minutes so they weren't left with a lot of time to draw but many of them had good beginnings.  Here are some of my hard workers:

This story features a cat named Rosie.  In the second frame, her owner is taking her for a walk.  I am having a bad memory right now but this student had an entire story already going with just these two frames.  She was very excited to take her paper with her so she could finish the story at her next opportunity.  Perhaps she will bring it back to share next week? 

This story is of a man who goes on the hunt for a shark.  It takes him a long time but eventually he finds one. Again, the amount of detail the student was telling me while explaining the photo was amazing.  Students are amazing! 

I found that my second grade classes were the best at telling this story because they were really able to put themselves in the place of Daisy and think about her feelings throughout the story.  All of the levels understood the story but second grade showed the most empathy for Daisy. 

Stay tuned - two more books to go!