The Art Lesson by Tomie dePaola Classroom Activity Ideas

Published: September 4, 2022
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The Art Lesson by Tomie dePaola Classroom Activity Ideas

I’ve always had a soft spot for Tomie dePaola books and The Art Lesson is a great little autobiography to share with your class.

The Art Lesson Close-Read

Each week in our Engaging Readers units, we work on reading comprehension strategies during our close reading time. Research tells us that students in K-2 need repeated exposure to books that exceed their decoding abilities. This is needed because their listening comprehension is higher than their own reading abilities at this stage of their life. So during an interactive read-aloud, the teacher does the decoding, but the students do the thinking work.

While working with this book, students will practice the following reading comprehension strategies:

Visualization
Retelling (pictured below)
Making Connections (pictured below)
Inferring
Opinion Writing

The Art Lesson Vocabulary, Sentence Study, and Art Project

Here is the pocket chart activity we include in our Engaging Readers Lesson Plans. Each week we look closely at 2 vocabulary words.

And when we can combine our art/craft with our sentence study, we do it!

You will find this directed drawing and sentence study in the Engaging Readers too!

Assessing with ESGI

This last week I was able to get the bulk of my ELA assessments done. I do not need to tell you how challenging those beginning of the school year assessments can be. They take a ton of time. BUT… ESGI makes it so much easier!

I always tell people that ESGI is “Bake Sale” worthy. It is the one online tool that I would host a bake sale in order to afford. Honestly, is saves so much time, the reports are amazing, and you can truly progress monitor your students.

While working with this group of students, I was asked to make a few custom assessments. This was so easy with ESGI!

Introducing Centers

When introducing centers, we want to be doing it slowly. The beginning of the year is tough, so you’ll want to give yourself grace and introduce centers that students can do independently. Here are a few of my favorites.

ABC Centers

These centers are really simple. Students feel successful as they learn the routines of center time.

In the photo above, students are putting the letters in alphabetical order.

In the photo below, students are matching the capital letter and the lowercase letter. Then coloring the pup to match. Simple!

This set of activities is from my:

Anytime Literacy Centers: Letters and Print Concepts

Sight Word Centers

Since we introduce sight words at the beginning of the year, we like to practice them… a LOT!

The fact that these are editable makes them so simple to customize! You can find them by clicking:

Sight Words Centers EDITABLE! AUG/SEPT

BUMP Color version

When learning to play a new game, we want to hook students! So we keep the academics on hold, while students become comfortable with the game structure. Once students learn the game, we will swap the colors for things like letters, words, numbers,… the possibilities are endless!