A Smiling Salad Emergent Reader Activity
BEFORE READING
Ask children what kinds of vegetables they like to have in their salads. Have children draw pictures of their favorite salad ingredients. Show the cover of the book and ask children to predict how a salad might become a smiling salad.
READING
Set a purpose for reading. Ask children to make guesses about what they think the boy seems to be doing. Encourage them to notice the colors and numbers of the vegetables.
Use questions such as these to guide the reading:
• What do you think the child is making?
• Why isn’t he using more vegetables?
• Describe how you would make the eyes, ears, mouth, or nose.
WORKSHEET & Sample PDF Activity
Sample PDF Activity
AFTER READING
Talk about what happened in the book. Review children’s pre-reading predictions. Ask children if they were surprised by the ending. Have children think about vegetables they would and would not put in a salad.
Response Activities
Salad Recipes
Materials: paper, crayons, salad ingredients, bowl
Let children view the available ingredients and think about their own secret salad recipe. Have them work in pairs to make a face, a design, or even letters. Have them write the ingredients and quantities they used in their recipe.
Salad Dressing Poll
Materials: none
Ask each child to tell their favorite kind of salad dressing. Record their choices and list them in order from the most to the least popular. Have children discuss ways to record the results of the poll, such as using tallies, graphs, or counters.
PHONICS FOCUS
Identifying Short e Sound
Reread the book aloud and ask children to listen for words that have the short e sound in the middle (get, red). Write these on the board as children name them. Then direct children to look at pepper on page 7. Cover the last half of the word (-pers) and ask children how the first part is like get and red. (It has the short e sound in the middle.)
MINI LESSONS
• READING STRATEGY
Following Directions
Provide children with paper and crayons. Review the story aloud step by step and ask children to consider the quantity, shape, and color of each vegetable. Have them construct a smiling face on paper that follows the oral instructions you are reading from the book. Compare their results with the last page of the story.
• LANGUAGE PATTERN
Identifying Color Words
Write on cards the color words found in the story. Play a color scavenger hunt game with children. Hold up a color word and challenge everyone to find something of that color in the classroom that is small enough to hold. Count to ten while children search the room for the correct color. See who can find something while you count. Repeat the game with other color words.
