Pet Show!

Keats, Ezra Jack. (1972). Pet Show. New York, New York: Viking Penguin. (Picturebook).

It's time for the Pet Show and Archie is eager to try to win an award. But his pet, his cat, is missing! Archie's quick-thinking still gives him the chance to win an award and he finds his cat in the process.

Connecting to the Standards
Kindergarten L (5a,b): With guidance and support from adults, explore word relationships and nuances in word meanings. a. Sort common objects into categories (e.g., shapes, foods) to gain a sense of the concepts the categories represent. b. Demonstrate understanding of frequently occurring verbs and adjectives by relating them to their opposites (antonyms).

• The book has a variety of words that can be organized into groups including animals and adjectives.

Kindergarten RL (3): With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in a story.

• There are multiple recognizable characters in the story, from the main character, Archie, to the supporting characters, Roberto, Peter, and Susie. 

Kindergarten RL (7): With prompting and support, describe the relationship between illustrations and the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment in a story an illustration depicts).

• In the illustrations, you can see clear connections to the text. The clearest connection is during the sequence, "Willie chased the mouse. Roberto chased Willie. Peter chased Roberto. Susie chased Peter." The illustration clearly shows this sequence in a linear fashion.

Learning Outcomes

Through this book, students will be able to sort words into categories including animals and adjectives. During the pet show, a diversity of pets and adjectives to describe the pets are used in the text. Students should be able to take a list of these words mixed up and organize them in small groups into their respective categories. They will create a graph that shows the different words in their categories which will be collected as data.

Adapted to the Classroom

I would start by establishing some prior schema about sorting before reading the book. Students would sort familiar categories such as fruits, numbers, letters, etc. Then I would do a full classroom read-aloud, guided by the teacher. This would help to establish the story with the classroom before they begin to work in groups/independently. 

Once students are familiar with the story, they can begin to work in small groups, sorting the words found in the books into a graph. On one side would be animals, the other side adjectives. Here is the word list:

Animals: ant, mouse, cat, parrot, frog, fish, canary, goldfish, dog, puppy, turtle

Description: noisy, handsome, friendly, yellow, busy, bright, long, fast, soft, slow

The final activity would to have students bring in their stuffed animals (or have the teacher provide them because of lice and bed bugs) or have students have their very own pet show. They could use the adjectives or new one's they've come up with to give every pet their own blue ribbon. This may be difficult because not every student may have a pet. Another idea would be to introduce one or two classroom pets and have the children decide on an award for the pets. 

Bloom's Taxonomy

Who is the main character of this story? (Knowledge)

Classify a list of words according to the category. (Analysis)

Create your own blue ribbon awards using descriptive words/adjectives for ___________. (Sythesis)

Differentiation

Most of these activities should be doable for most students. If there is any cutting for the graph students are to make, the teacher should probably do it as there are a lot of words to be cut out. Because animals are an interest among many young children, this book and the accompanying activities should hold most students interest. Activities will be limited to a short time and may even be spread over a few days to make sure interest doesn't wane and children are actively involved.