Reading Update

Our main selection this week was entitled, “Farfallina & Marcel,” a warm story about an unlikely pair of friends, a caterpillar and a duck. We talked about how these two types of animals grow and change in different ways- the caterpillar goes through the metamorphosis process and changes entirely, while the duck simply grows larger in size until it reaches maturity. While reading this story, the children learned how to make inferences to build their comprehension. We learned that an inference is a good guess about something that happened in the story that the author doesn’t specifically tell us. We broke down this process into steps. First, we think about something that we read in the text. Then, we think about information we already know about it. Last, we put the two together and think about a likely outcome based on these two things. For example, we READ that Farfallina was up in the tree, wrapped in silk. We KNOW that caterpillars create a chrysalis in order to go through their metamorphic change. Therefore we were able to INFER that Farfallina would soon be a butterfly! As we continued reading, we were able to confirm that we were correct! Making inferences can be a challenging skill, but breaking it down into steps this way seemed to be very helpful for the children. Vocabulary words we noticed in this story include: fluttered, recognized, snuggled, vanished, peered, and giggled. We noticed that all of these words are verbs, and they are all in the past tense!