Mr. Giso's Room to Read: It Looked Like Spilt Milk--Art and Science Integration

I'm sure many of you are familiar with this handy book with the repetitive text on which early readers rely to be successful as a beginning readers. It's called It Looked Like Split Milk by Charles G. Shaw (scroll to the bottom of my blog to order it from Amazon).

In the first trimester of first grade, we study weather. A fabulous colleague of mine shared this my first year as a first grade teacher. It's a fun and quick writing and art project that supplements our learning of cumulus clouds. In the book, we are given "ink-blot like" images of things that look like an ice cream come, tree, birthday cake, etc., but really aren't. After sharing the book in a read aloud, we make the connection on how the white and puffy clouds known as cumulus clouds, often look like different things in the sky.

Now, the fun begins! I have students use an eye dropper to suck up and drop a few drops of white tempera paint on blue construction paper. They fold it in half and rub the paper. Next they open it up. If they are satisfied with their creation, they are done. If not, I let them add no more than two drops of paint in the center a final time. They repeat the rubbing process.

After that, students examine their paintings and imagine they are cumulus clouds. What do they look like? Students fill in a cloze prompt that copies the repetitive text in the book. The end result is an interactive bulletin board. I have students predict what each student said his or her cloud looked like and then lift the flap to confirm their predictions. Here's the final products.