Whooo Whooo

Owl Moon is a fantastic book. It's lovely that I get to read these books to my kids. We don't just read them though, we use them. Harry wasn't so into the book the first time we went through it. It's a slow, 'soft' book and it just didn't catch his eye. But I persevered. I had him tell me the story back (narrate) which he did. I had to get him started a little with some questions, but once he started going, he really knew what he was talking about.

One if the questions I asked him was, "are there lots of people in the story or just a few?" I expected him to say a few--a dad and daughter. But he told me there were lots. I wasn't real sure we had read the same book, so I had him tell me more. He told me that there were two in the woods--a grandpa and his granddaughter and the rest of the family was in the house.

We also talked about similies and metaphors. In the book Jane Yolen uses several similies, including one that says something like "the snow was as white as milk in a cereal bowl." We tried to come up with how we would tell someone about the ocean if they had never seen it. It didn't go perfectly, but it did plant a seed.

(This is getting long, I know, but bear with me, please.)

Finally I brought home a couple of owl books from the library and we figured out that the owl in the book is a Great Horned Owl. So we looked up where they live and what they eat and all of that stuff. We ended this by being Great Horned Owls hopping from branch to branch and eating mice off of the ground.

We got a lot in, but didn't beat the story into the ground.