City Dog, Country Frog Activity Ideas and more

City Dog Country Frog Activities and Mentor Text lesson ideas are here! Find reading comprehension and writing ideas to use with this amazing book by Mo Willems. 

City Dog, Country Frog Mentor Text

I don’t remember the exact moment I fell in love with City Dog, Country Frog by Mo Willems.  I think it was actually a love at first sight sort of thing.  I love the theme that two individuals who are so different can still find a true friendship.  They take turns doing dog things and they take turns doing frog things.

And when fall came, Country Frog found he was growing tired.  So they did remembering things.  Jon Muth illustrated this beautifully in this picture below.  Beyond the beautiful language, are you getting ideas on how to use this book as a writing mentor text?  Wow!  What a great lesson in illustrating memories!

When winter comes, Country Frog cannot be found.  The stillness of this moment is captured perfectly in this illustration.  Knowing what I know about this book, this is the page that usually starts the tears flowing.  Every. Time. I. Read. This. Book. I. Cry!

This book of friendship, loss, and keeping memories alive BEGS to be read again and again and again!

City Dog, Country Frog Engaging Readers

This is the reason we selected this book for our Engaging Readers series.  In order to have DEEP conversations about books, you must select books that linger in your heart.  Your students can tell the difference and the time you spend with this book will be rewarded!  Selecting rich literature is the key!

So we have a 5-day lesson plan for this text!   Each day, we focus on one reading comprehension strategy.  The teacher does the decoding work, while the students do the thinking work to make meaning of the text.  Each of our Engaging Readers texts is formatted so we revisit various comprehension strategies again and again.  City Dog, Country Frog focuses on these skills:

• visualization
• retell the text with key details
• character study
• inferring
• opinion writing
• vocabulary
• grammar skills
• phonemic awareness
• phonics
• sentence study

You just have to print and teach!

retelling

Here are the color retelling cards students use to cooperatively work to sequence.

Once the color cards are placed in order, students practice orally retelling the story with their partner.  Then the students will construct their own retelling strip using black and white images.

Character study

Students also look at how characters act and sometimes change throughout the story.  Each comprehension strategy has a response page option. Do you need students to respond each day?  I don’t think so.  The power of these lessons is in the scaffolding of instruction and the conversations students have surrounding a text.

Extending the Learning with City Dog, Country Frog

Whenever possible, we want to extend the learning into other areas of the day.   This is a fun activity to look at force and motion.

You can find this activity by clicking HERE.

City Dog, Country Frog Math and Literacy Centers Too!

We have created differentiated math and literacy center activities for this book.   In this way, you can have two levels of the same task.  

A quick sentence correction worksheet is handy for focusing on writing conventions.

And this print and play math activity also has two different levels.

We’d love to see your classroom photos in action!   If you are on Instagram you can follow me by clicking HERE.  Then tag us with #engagingreaders so we can see your awesomeness!

You can find more mentor text ideas over on my Pinterest page.  Click HERE.