Apt. 3

Keats, Ezra Jack. (1971). Apt. 3. New York, New York: Penguin Group

The sounds of their apartment fill their ears as two brothers seek out the music they hear playing. They end up at Apt. 3 where they discover a blind man playing the harmonica. They learn a lot about what he can do, and invite him to take a walk with him the next day.

Connecting to the Standards
Grade 3 RL (1): With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.

• This story has a clear theme.

Grade 3 RL (2): With prompting and support, identify the main topic and retell key details of a text.

• The main topic I want students to gain from this is the sounds they hear on a daily basis.

Grade 3 W (3): Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences. a. Establish a situation and introduce a narrator and/or characters; organize an event sequence that unfolds naturally. b. Use dialogue and descriptions of actions, thoughts, and feelings to develop experiences and events or show the response of characters to situations. c. Use temporal words and phrases to signal event order. d. Provide a sense of closure.

• This story gives a great opportunity for students to write about the sounds they hear on a daily basis.

Grade 3 L (3): Use knowledge of language and its conventions when writing, speaking, reading, or listening. a. Choose words and phrases for effect.* b. Recognize and observe differences between the conventions of spoken and written standard English.

• Students will be required to listen and write about what they hearing during the activity in this lesson.

Learning Outcomes

Students will be able to answer questions about the text and, with prompting from the teacher, should be able to identify the main topic of the story for the purpose of this lesson. Students will engage in a soundscape activity where they will identify the sounds they hear on a daily basis in different parts of their everyday. They will write a simple narrative based around these sounds.

Adapted to the Classroom

The class will engage in a teacher-led read-aloud of the book Apt. 3. The teacher should stop along the way to ask questions about the sounds that are heard in the apartment complex. Ask if students hear these sounds where they live too. Students should be asked to hear these sounds in their head, imagining what it would sound like to be in that environment.

Students will then engage in a creative-writing activity that takes the sounds of their environment and turn it into a narrative. Students should engage in listening exercises in various places that they spend a large amount of time in. Students will have a chance to write about each soundscape after they occur. The soundscapes could be done over a long period of time since students will need to take down their thoughts during each one. These soundscapes should not only help students writing skills, but also their listening skills which are critical in group work.

Bloom's Taxonomy

What are the sounds of the apartment? (Knowledge)
Imagine what that environment would sound like. (Synthesis)
Determine the sounds you hear in your everyday life. (Application)
Create a narrative based off of these sounds. (Synthesis)

Differentiation
Clearly, deaf students would be unable to participate in this type of activity, so it may not be an appropriate activity for an inclusion classroom that has a deaf student.

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.