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Thursday, February 9, 2012

Quick as a Cricket visuals to download

Child finds the ending, then reads the sentence.

 One of my favorite books is Quick as a Cricket by Audrey Wood.  It's all about self-confidence and parts of a child's personality.  Here's the review on Amazon---

"I'm as quick as a cricket, I'm as slow as a snail. I'm as small as an ant, I'm as large as a whale." Parents and teachers choose this big square book for the message of self-confidence. Toddlers love it for the singsong phrases and Don Wood's large, silly, endearing illustrations, which feature a boy mimicking different kinds of animals. At one point, he is pictured sipping tea formally with a fancy poodle ("I'm as tame as a poodle") and on the very next page he is swinging through trees ("I'm as wild as a chimp"). Whether brave or shy, strong or weak, in the end the young boy celebrates all different, apparently contradictory parts of himself. With a confident grin, he lifts his arms up and declares, "Put it all together and you've got ME!"

 The repetitive line is great for my kids, but I always try to add visuals.  Some of the vocabulary is new, and good icons help with comprehension.  I've made some of my own boards in the past, but on Boardmaker Share, I found this great set, complete with a real Basset hound picture, and a poodle.   I rearranged the symbols a bit so that the child can manipulate the symbols to make a new sentence following the same pattern for every page.

Here's a link to download the Boardmaker verson--With this, you can change things even more!

Here's a link to download the pdf version---you can't change the board, but it's still good!


I do appreciate the person who put this up on Boardmaker Share to begin with.
Thanks, kind person!



The most fun part of this book is having the children identify their own personality traits and feelings. It's a bit of self reflection, and some can reflect better than others.  Basically, I print out a lot of feelings/character trait icons and allow the kids to each pick four.  Those that can, explain why they chose them.  I take a picture, print, assemble, and presto!  Here's an example of the result.  With this girl, if you look carefully, you can see where I penciled in her reasons for choosing the attribute on each icon. She said she was "fast in gym, pretty when I wear glasses, smart when I read, lazy when I watch TV, and nice to Ms. Kelley."  
  (This picture is actually about 8 years old--the girl is now in high school!)

So, that's my share of the day!    This is a great book and if you have additional thoughts or ideas about it, please share!

3 comments:

  1. Thank you for sharing this. I'm trying to incorporate more books in my therapy session and this is helpful.

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  2. Thanks so much for sharing this! I'm about to do a lesson on that book and my ESOL kids will adore this!

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