The Velveteen Rabbit

Summary

This lesson is designed for book appreciation. Students need to be surrounded by good literature. Because this can be purchased in a chapter form with no pictures, I have students visualize and relate things in this story to other text, world, and self and I choose to read the chapter version.

Materials

A collection of stuffed animals, a toy rabbit or a real one if possible, the book 'The Velveteen Rabbit,' the video of 'The Velveteen Rabbit.'

Background for Teachers

I like to begin by connecting the book to background information such as having a collectin of stuffed animals or discussing rabbits.

Intended Learning Outcomes

Students will learn to make predictions using information from the story (comprehension) and relate it a text to text connection, a text to self connection or a text to world connection. This helps students relate to the story better and have a better understanding and interest in the story.

Instructional Procedures

I begin my discussing stuffed animals so everyone can relate hopefully by a self experience to stuffed animals if they have ever had one. I teach in a poor area and some of the children do not know what a stuffed animal is so we talk about them. I also have a pet rabbit at my home and I bring it to school on this day. We begin by talking about a rabbit and doing a KWL Chart - what we know, what we want to know, what we want to learn - we do this on rabbits as a group, brainstorm together. We add to the list 'What we learned' as we read we add to this group. I read the story to the class. This usually takes two days (I have found that if I push to get finished in a day, some students tune out and become tired. The more vioce you can add the easier it is to keep the students' attention. I stop frequently and discuss. I also let students tell about connections they have made when the make a text to self, text to world or text to text connection. This seems to really help with comprehension. While reading the story we discuss and include setting, feelings, characters. After the story is finished we discuss again and compare the stuffed rabbit to the real rabbit. We look at the toy rabbit and the real rabbit I brought to school and we compare to the velvetten rabbit. I bring in some velvet so they can see how soft the velveteen rabbit would be. I show the students the video of the 'The Velveteen Rabbit' and discuss similarities and differences between the video and the book. We include math and graph which each student liked better - book or movie. I took the students to our internet lab this year and we looked up some sights from the story. I took them to enchantedlearning.com. This is a great site with lots of options for books. There are even books they can read themselves on this. We research rabbits as a class and individually. I take them to the library and our librarian shows them how to find more information on rabbits. We keep the most important ideas and write a class book on rabbits. After school I type it up so there are enough pages for each student to illustrate one page. I put the class book in our class library - this book becomes a big hit. They all take ownership of it.

Extensions

For art during this week, I have the students make pictures of rabbits and use water colors to create a setting. These pictures are hung for display in the hall and titled 'The Velveteen Rabbit.' When we connect art projects to literature I always have the students help me create a summary of the book. We put this as well as the author by our work so other students who are interested can read this book. I have given each of the students a piece of velvet to trace a rabbit on but this got expensive. They did turn out adoreable.

Assessment Plan

Check for comprehension during the story by asking students what they would do if they were the child. Ask lots of questions to keep them thinking and connecting to the story.