This week at the RBE Library, our first grade students had a special extended lesson! I knew they were reading about Frankenstein in their classrooms this week and writing about their Frankensteins, so I wanted to connect with their writing and reading curriculum in the library as well.
I had seen a blog post by Sandy Karas Liptak about her Monster Mash that she did with the book The Monstore by Tara Lazar and illustrated by James Burks. I knew I could tweak what she had done to work with what I wanted to do.
So, during story time I read this wonderful book to our students. We talked about that Zack wants a moster to help him keep hi pesky sister out of his room, so he goes to the Monstore to get just the right monster to do the job. See the monsters at the Monstore are really helpful around the house. They eat the yucky food from your dinner plate you don’t like and they have glowing eyes so you can read under your covers at night. Well, a problem arises with the first monster, and Zack gets more than he bargained for at the Monstore!
After the reading, we went to the tables. I used the die-cut to cut colored paper in different shapes: circles, squares, ovals, triangles, and trapezoids. I had the kids pick one of those shapes, and then I had colored paper that we had cut into fourths, and the kids got to pick one of those too. I created an example monster, Firea,, and showed them how I used the different colored 1/4 sheet to dreate body parts for my shape piece.
Then I read my example writing piece to go with it. I told the kids that their writing needed to give their monster a name, tell something useful that their monster did for them, and explain why they liked their monster.
The kids came up with all sorts of crazy creations and writings about their monster! Plus, they had a ton of fun doing it! We hope we have inspired you to create and write about monsters too! If you like this lesson, here is the PDF of the Monster Creation and Writing Pages and here is the Monster Writing & Creation Pages Word Document if you would like to modify it to fit your needs.
You can see the pics of the different classes of monster below.
1st Grade Monster Creation Pics