The Mitten – Activites, Lesson Plans and Ideas
The Mitten, by Jan Brett is an excellent book to read with your ELL students during the long Winter doldrums that continue on after the return back to school from the long holiday break.
I’d like to give my friend Miss Christie a special shout out for reminding me about what a fabulous resource Jan Brett’s book, The Mitten is for ELL students.
The main reason I like The Mitten is because it’s the perfect Winter themed activity that is great to use during the January/February doldrums.
The sites I’ve included below, contain lots of activities, lesson plans and ideas that you can use in your classroom.
Jan Brett’s Site – Includes some really cute PDF printouts that you can use to have the children retell the story while they “tuck” the animals inside the mittens.
The Animals that you can tuck inside the mitten.
Winter Camp PowerPoints
The activities are built right into the PowerPoint. Bring some some extra paper along so you can create the menus and make sure the kids bring their notebooks and crayons with them too.
This year our Winter camp will be held in another building far away from the new campus, so we don’t have access to a copier. Fortunately, we will bring the LED projectors with us, so I decided to put everything on PowerPoints, instead of handouts.
Below are the three PowerPoints I used for camp. They don’t have to be exclusively used for Winter camp. Take a look at them and see if they could be useful to you…
Winter Camp 1.1 – This PowerPoint reviews when to use before and after, ordering food, descriptive food words and a few conversational activities that can also be used as writing assignments. I’ve thrown in a creative writing assignment too. The kids have to create their own menus. I’ve provided a sample Mexican menu on one of the slides, but you will have to search for your own Italian menu or use Luigi’s Italian menu instead. After the menus are done, they take turns placing their order. While one pretends to be the waiter, the other one places their order.
Winter Camp 1.2- This PowerPoint has lots of grammar and conversation exercises, as well as, a classroom survey. Everything is built right into the presentation. All the students need is a piece of paper, a pencil and an eraser.
Winter Camp 1.3- This short PowerPoint reviews some simple grammar and requires the student to identify several activities within a paragraph.