From Jan Brett’s Website…. When Nicki drops his white mitten in the snow, he goes on without realizing that it is missing. One by one, woodland animals find the mitten and crawl in; first a curious mole, then a rabbit, a badger and others, each one larger than the last. Finally, a big brown bear is followed in by a tiny brown mouse, and what happens next makes a wonderfully funny climax. As the story of the animals in the mitten unfolds, the reader can see Nicki in the borders of each page, walking through the woods unaware of what is going on. Once again Jan Brett has created a dramatic and beautiful picture book in her distinctive style. She brings the animals to life with warmth and humor, and her illustrations are full of visual delights and details faithful to the Ukrainian tradition, from which the story comes.
Me….. I absolutely LOVE this book. It has the best pictures, relatively short and entertains both the children and the adults…. I read this with my class a couple weeks ago and we did a lot of different activities with it.
I had planned to do a picture walk first but I ran out of time on Monday, so we jumped right in on Tuesday. After we read the story through, we talked about how many animals went in the mitten, in what order and if that many animals would actually fit in our mittens. Then to start the activity from her site, I had the students color in the animals during centers that day. The next day, we re-read it and talked about the order they went in again. Then I showed them the mitten that we had made copies of on construction paper and how they would cut them out (2) and then we would staple them to make our on mitten. After the mittens were made, we cut out the animals we colored the day before. Then I re-read the story again, and while I read the book, the students put the animals in their own mitten. Super cute.
Thursday I had a short emergent book that the students could read themselves. We ‘read’ it through together and then the students colored in the books. I showed them how they could use their mittens from the day before to read and act this story out at home. Everybody was SUPER excited to show their parents.
Other activities we did during the week included counting / graphing the amount of mittens vs. gloves we had as a class, teaching the word was, and working on AB and ABB patterns by coloring in mittens.
This is one of my favorite winter books. What are some of your favorite winter books?