The Snowy Day Read Aloud for Kindergarten The Core Coaches
The Snowy Day
‘The Snowy Day’ by Ezra Jack Keats is the perfect read-aloud for Kindergartners in January. They love following the little boy on his adventures through the city on a very snow day. If you haven’t had a chance to read this Caldecott award winning story, you are missing out. You can use the video below if you don’t have a copy of the book in your classroom.
First exposure to The Snowy Day
We started the lesson by watching the video with Kindergartners. I asked some key ideas and details text dependent questions. Then together, we completed a sequence of events graphic organizer. My kids all remembered something the little boy did on the snowy day. We worked together to put the events in the correct order. I had them think of three events to write and draw in the correct order on their own graphic organizer.
Second exposure to the story
The second day I pulled out the book instead of the video. This time I read the story to them and stopped to ask craft and structure questions throughout the story.
The questions focused on the craft in the story. We discussed what the text said and what the illustration showed. I was impressed with the connections they were making between the text and illustrations. This is always a hard standard for me to teach, but this lesson and text dependent questions really helped me focus in on this specific standard. Then we completed the graphic organizer below as a class.
Third exposure to the story
On the third day we read the story again. I love that the students enjoy reading a story more than once. They learn that during each read they get to focus on something new within the story. They are always eager to read the story again and are thoroughly engaged as I ask the text dependent questions.
To learn more about text dependent questions or close reading you can clink on the links to visit our blog posts on these topics. As I read the story on the third day I stopped to ask ‘integration of knowledge and ideas’ text dependent questions. Then I had the students write what they would like to do in the snow and why. The writing turned out so cute.
Once they were finished with the writing I had the students complete this fun snow scene craftivity inspired from the beautiful illustrations in the book. They LOVED it!
Check out The Snowy Day Interactive Read Aloud
Looking for Winter read aloud suggestions? Check out our K-1 Read Alouds for January along with our K-2 Read Alouds for December.
Here is a year-round favorite focusing on friendship (One Cool Friend).
