I loved this book growing up. I love anything that rhymes and a book like this with a sing-songy rhythm makes for a fun engaging read for kids.

I treasure this book so much and cannot wait to teach it in my future classroom. I think the multifaceted themes elicit important and necessary conversations among young readers. Above all, my goal is to cultivate kind and empathetic student readers and this book does a great job supporting my targets.

This book has been recognized and distinguished with a Caldecott Honor, John Newberry Medal, and Coretta Scott King award. Not only has it been awarded most distinguished contribution to American literature for children, but it also honored with badge of peaceful and non-violent social change. The themes are universal, current, and important while the illustrations are vivid, symbolic, and memorable.

As a future educator, it is extremely important that I meet Illinois Professional Teaching Standards in every lesson that I teach. This picture book unit plan incorporates various assessment strategies that I made to correspond with the story in addition to an emphasis on reading comprehension. This unit focuses on the close relationship between reading, writing, and communication as students identify and relate to the theme.

Creating a unit plan about a picture book that I love will make me a better educator in the future. By implementing various activities to utilize throughout my assessments, I demonstrate how I incorporate multiple techniques in order to reach students at all levels. Students are given a proper amount of time with various, engaging activities to apply their learning. Because direct feedback provides students with opportunities to achieve, ways of strengthening weaknesses, and generates an open dialogue; I incorporate individual conferencing whenever necessary. Connecting my unit to my students’ experiences, contributes to a positive learning environment and embraces diversity.

I am confident the hard work that I put into this unit plan is reflective of the competent teacher as represented by the Illinois Professional Teaching Standard #6

6A)understands appropriate and varied instructional approaches used before, during, and after reading, including those that develop word knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, and strategy use in the content areas;

6D)understands writing processes and their importance to content learning

6F)recognizes the relationships among reading, writing, and oral communication and understands how to integrate these components to increase content learning;

6G)understands how to design, select, modify, and evaluate a wide range of materials for the content areas and the reading needs of the student;

6H)understands how to use a variety of formal and informal assessments to recognize and address the reading, writing, and oral communication needs of each student; and

6M)uses modeling, explanation, practice, and feedback to teach students to monitor and apply comprehension strategies independently, appropriate to the content learning;

6N)teaches students to analyze, evaluate, synthesize, and summarize information in single texts and across multiple texts, including electronic resources;

6O)teaches students to develop written text appropriate to the content areas that utilizes organization (e.g., compare/contrast, problem/solution), focus, elaboration, word choice, and standard conventions (e.g., punctuation, grammar);

6P)integrates reading, writing, and oral communication to engage students in content learning;

6R)stimulates discussion in the content areas for varied instructional and conversational purposes