Glue, Giggles and Grace: Mrs. Wishy Washy

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Mrs. Wishy Washy

In the Tub You Go!

The munchkins always love the crazy antics of Mrs. Wishy Washy and her mud-loving farm animals, plus this story is an excellent way to learn about story components. We spend so much time discussing and recreating the characters, setting and the beginning, middle & end of the story.

The most memorable experience in recreating characters and story sequence is most definitely dramatization of the story.

After making stick puppets of all the characters, the munchkins loved taking turns as different characters to retell the story!

"Oh, lovely mud" said the cow. And she jumped in it!

"Oh, lovely mud", said the pig. And he rolled in it!

"Oh, lovely mud" said the duck. And she paddled in it!

Along came Mrs. Wishy Washy.

"Just LOOK at you!" she screamed.

Another fun tool for retelling and story sequencing was our mini storyboard. The munchkins made a setting board with Mrs. Wishy-Washy, her tub and the mud puddle. Then they made little stick puppets that could "jump" in the mud and then be "washed" in the tub.

Adding a sentence strip at the top also gave the munchkins the opportunity to practice some of their newly emerging writing skills. They are doing a great job readily using sight words correctly in their writing, plus, they are fantastic at using conventions (such as upper case letters and punctuation) as well!

We reinforced those same writing skills in another fun activity...

We made a Mrs. Wishy Washy cartoon character, complete with speech bubble. She was quite a challenge to color, cut and glue together. It almost made the sentence seem like the easy part!

"In the tub you go!"

But Mrs. Wishy Washy's animals were not the only things that ended up in that tub! We made several class books that had all sorts of things getting
wishy-washy washed!

We started with the cow, the pig and the duck, focusing on recognizing each of those words in the text so that we could illustrate the picture correctly.

But then we added something new...

ourselves!

Don't you just love it?!

After that, we decided to work on some rhyming words. We studied and created a list of "at" family words: cat, bat, fat, sat, rat, hat, mat, pat.

We used a pre-printed booklet that had several of these items "in the tub". The munchkins had to decode each word to know what to draw.

A cat is in the tub.

A bat is in the tub.

A hat is in the tub.

A rat is in the tub.

Then came probably the most fun of all! We put ourselves in the tub!

Wishy-washy! Wishy-washy!

All the munchkins had their pictures taken "scrubbing". The pictures were cut out and pasted in the "tub". Everyone loves reading this one at the reading center!

After all the talk of mud, we decided to see how many of the munchkins liked mud. We chose to create a classroom graph that would give us the answer.

Almost all the munchkins said that they would jump in the mud if they had the chance!

So, we decided to write in our journals about how much we like the mud. What a great way to practice some more writing...especially counting sounds and writing an unknown: m-u-d.