Read Aloud Books for January 14

Snowflake Bentley is the true story of William "Snowflake" Bentley, the first person to photograph snowflakes. As a teenager, in rural Vermont, he began to photograph snowflakes using a camera with a microscope attached, over 100 years ago. The class learned that it is possible to find beauty in ordinary things and not to give up on your dreams. His early attempts did not work but he did not give up and eventually he documented thousands of different snowflake patterns (see his book below). This week outside, the students marvelled at the delicate patterns of fallen snowflakes on their mittens, just like Snowflake Bentley.

Snowflakes in Photographs is a reprint of the original monograph published by William Bentley in 1932. Unfortunately, he passed away a few weeks after it's publication. He caught pneumonia after walking home in a blizzard to photograph more snowflakes. Bentley felt, from the beginning, that these photographs would be his gift to the world. From viewing these photographs, the children saw not only, the huge variety of snowflake patterns but also, the care Bentley took to document them.

The book, Shape, is a great introduction to geometry. It shows the familiar shapes of circles, triangles, squares, rectangles and hexagons. Hexagons became a particular favourite after I told the class that it was a "grade one word"! It demonstrates how shapes differ from one another (number of sides and corners, or vertices) and how shapes can be different sizes but still the same shape. It also has a lot of photographs demonstrating how to find geometric shapes in the real world (for example, bricks in a wall are rectangle-shaped). This was a great book to go with our geometry unit.

The Little Fur Family is a book that has a lovely, lyrical tone. The author, Margaret Wise Brown, also wrote Goodnight Moon. It is the story of a family that's "warm as toast, smaller than most and they lived in a warm, wooden tree". It follows the adventures of the little fur child during the course of a cold winter day. At the end of the book, the mother and father tuck the little one into bed and sing a song (or lullabye) to help their child sail off to dreamland. This is the type of fiction story that is so captivating, that when I read it aloud to the class, you could hear a pin drop!