A Day at the Beach

Well, it wasn't really a day at the beach, but this morning we had another book club and I made it into a beach day because we read The Seashore Book by Charlotte Zolotow.  This is a book I would definetely want to own.  The pictures are lovely, but the writing, in my opinion, stands on its own.  Zolotow uses words like "swishswashing" to describe the sounds of the waves, and writes, "the cold water makes your skin feel like peppermint...."  If I were still teaching, I'd use this story as an example of great description using all five senses.

Before we read the book, I asked the kids what they knew about the beach.  They threw out words as fast as I could write them, and we compiled a list of what we know about the beach.  I tried to get the kids to think of color, texture, sound, things to do, etc.

After I read the story to them, the kids each got a bag and I told them they are going on a "beach hunt."  They needed to find seashells that I hid around our home and put them in the bag (I just printed out pictures of seashells and taped them all over our place).

(Don't know why this picture is flipped, sorry!)

Once the group found several seashells, I gave them each an empty "beach scene" (a brown grocery bag with a piece of blue construction paper glued to it) and told them to glue their shells on the beach and create a picture with whatever else they wanted to draw.

Here's Hadley's finished product:

I realize the shells are just a wee bit out of proprotion to the "ocean" and the sand.  Oh well.  Math has never been my thing.

After we made our pictures, we all went down and played at the water table for a bit.

Once we all got nice and hot, we went inside to have popsicles and drink juice.  At least for me, book club is turning out to be a lot of fun!