When Spring Comes Kindergarten and First Grade Read-Aloud and Activities.
Husband and wife Kevin Henkes and Laura Dronzek collaborate to create the story, “When Spring Comes.” This beautiful book captures the magic of seasonal change. Henkes’ lyrical words, along with Dronzek’s vibrant illustrations offer beautiful descriptions of all the changes that occur “if you wait” for winter to turn to spring.
Henkes’ craft includes so many wonderful elements e.g., alliteration, repetition, and imagery- all of which provide great content for text dependent questions, deep discussion, and response to text activities. My class and I were able to dive into the story deeply and revisit it multiple times for new purposes.
You may also like our And Then Spring Comes Lesson Plan
To address key ideas and details, we revisited the beautiful imagery in the story. I had my students discuss seasonal changes that occurred and had them choose one to recall and illustrate.
The story is perfect for covering the standard, “Identify words and phrases in stories or poems that suggest feelings or appeal to the senses.” Both the illustrations and text lend themselves to asking text dependent questions about the senses and other craft and structure elements such as alliteration and repetition. After this lesson I had students complete a senses graphic organizer using evidence from the story.
For our last interactive When Spring Comes read-aloud lesson I asked students to create a short poem using alliteration. We revisited the pages in the story where Henkes uses alliteration, chose a couple of letters, then brainstormed spring words beginning with those letters. We wrote a poem together as a class, then I introduced a Spring Words word bank to the students and asked them to write their own alliteration poems.
As a culminating activity, we made Spring Mobiles. Students used evidence from the story to illustrate things that represented spring. If you want to try out these text dependent questions and activities which meet all the core standards during your read-aloud time then you’re in luck! We have done all the work for you. You can purchase When Spring Comes by clicking on the link. 
