Shared Reading Plan

By: Jess Elliott

Book Information:
Book: “A House for Hermit Crab”
Author: Eric Carle
Illustrated by: Eric Carle
Level: PreK-Kindergarten

Introduction:
“A House for Hermit Crab” by Eric Carle is a theme related book to my Ocean Animals
lesson plan. This book doesn’t only introduce students to different creatures found in the ocean
but, it also has an underlying message. The underlying message in this story is that, sometimes
change is scary at first, but it can bring up wonderful opportunities and can be a good thing. The
story is about a Hermit Crab who outgrows his first shell and must look for a new home. He is
scared about the change, but he is able to face his fear and find a shell that fits him. His new shell
however is bare and doesn’t feel homey to him until he finds some other sea creature friends to
help him decorate it and stay with him.

This book is great for shared reading because it helps demonstrate the importance of
concepts of print, alphabet knowledge, phonological awareness through rhyming, phonemic
awareness, sight word, analogy words, and phonics. This book is great for teaching the letter “H”
because of repeated words like, “House” and “Hermit Crab”. It also has great use of sight words
such as, “he”, “but”, “you”, and the months of the year. The students will also learn that change
is okay and sometimes necessary in order to grow. Eric Carle’s great illustrations help to keep
the students interested all the way through the story. The topic of Hermit Crabs and other sea
creatures helps to engage the students to want to learn more about animals and helps introduce
them to the animals living in the ocean.

Focus 1 - Alphabet Knowledge

Standard/Indicator:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.1.D:

Recognize and name all upper- and lowercase letters of the alphabet.

Activity to Teach Alphabet Knowledge: Alphabet Sensory Bin

Alphabet knowledge is very important for students in their first year of school and for those that
are beginning to read. In order to read the words on a page, students must first know the letters
and sounds that make up each word. Upper and lower-case letter recognition is the first step and
the building block to Alphabet Knowledge. The activity called Alphabet Sensory Bin will help
the students to recognize each letter of the alphabet from a sensory bin and match it to its
corresponding letter elsewhere. The sensory bins are shown below, they can be filled with either
sand, beads, rice, etc., along with magnetic or felt letters of the alphabet. Each student will be
given their own sensory bin and sheet to match the letters on to. The sheet can be for example, a
cooking sheet, piece of paper, or puzzle. The students will then reach into their sensory bin and
match it to the corresponding letter on the sheet. When students pull a new letter out of their bin,
they can say the letter out loud which will help them practice their letter recognition in addition
to the matching. This activity can be used at different levels, depending on where each student is
at. For a child that is just starting off with letter recognition, you could give them a sheet with
only upper-case letters on it and a bin with only upper-case letters in it. For a child that already
knows their upper-case letters but has trouble recognizing which upper-case letter goes with its
corresponding lower-case letter, you could give them a sheet with lower case letters on it and a
bin with upper case letters in it, see below for example, middle picture. After the students get
proficient at matching the letters to the letters on the sheet, you could move on to giving them a
sheet with pictures on it, like, “ant” for a, and have them match the letters to the corresponding
pictures.

Focus 2: Phonological or Phonemic Awareness

Standard/Indicator:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2

Demonstrate understanding of spoken words, syllables, and sounds (phonemes).

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.2.E

Add or substitute individual sounds (phonemes) in simple, one-syllable words to make new
words.

Activity to Teach Phonemic Awareness: Segmenting Center Cards

This activity is to help practice phoneme segmentation. The idea of this activity is for the
students to break up the sounds in each word they are given and to figure out how many sounds
are in each word. The students can use anything to separate the sounds for each word, for
example, for beginners some items are, unifix cubes or bingo chips. For more advanced students
the items could include, wooden tiles, a dry erase marker, magnetic letters, etc. For the first
picture, it is good for this activity because they are short words that the students are familiar with
like, /d/ /o/ /g/ and /d/ /i/ /g/. For the second picture, this activity card could be used for teaching
phoneme segmentation and can also help the students practice the letter “Bb”. This activity is
good for beginners that are starting to become more advanced because they are easy words that
kids can relate to like, “bus” and “bed” and they are also easily broken up by sound like, /b/ /u/
/s/. Students can practice these in small groups or individually. While they are putting the chips
or tile with the sound of the words, they can practice saying segmenting the sounds out loud.
After the students complete all of the cards, we can go over them as a class or the students can
compare their answers in small groups. The last part to the activity is where students can sort the
words by the number of sounds in each word. For example, this would help the students connect
that /b/ /o/ /x/ and /b/ /e/ /d/ both have three phonemes. This “Segmenting Center Cards” activity
is a fun hands-on activity where the students have the control of breaking up the sounds
themselves along with practicing phoneme segmentation. Connecting this to “A House for
Hermit Crab”, the students could use pictures/words that go along with the book such as: Crab,
Water, Starfish, Ocean, Light, etc. This activity could also be modified to go along with any new
book that our class reads or lesson that we learn.
 Focus 3: Sight Words

Standard/Indicator:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.C

Read common high-frequency words by sight (e.g., the, of, to, you, she, my, is, are, do, does).

Activity to Teach Sight Words: Sight Word Legos

This activity is to help students with recognizing and learning to spell their sight words. Sight
Words, also known as high-frequency sight words are, “commonly used words that young
children are encouraged to memorize as a whole by sight, so that they can automatically
recognize these words in print without having to use any strategies to decode” (Wikipedia).
Teaching sight words with Legos is a great activity to get the students to want to participate
because it is something that they are familiar with already and like to play with. This activity will
include a bunch of Legos with letters written on them and either a bigger Lego with a sight word
written on it or a piece of paper with the sight words written on it. They will be able to dig
through the bin of Legos with letters on them and find the letters that make up the sight word
they are trying to build. With the first picture and the sight word “can”, the students know that
they have to find three letters, (c) (a) (n), in order to spell the word and complete the Lego on
top. After the students find the letters, they can practice writing them down on a sheet of paper.
The last picture is an advanced version of the activity for when the students know the sight
words already and can put sentences together. The students can than write the sentences out and
draw a picture that goes with the sentence that they made with their sight words. “A House for
Hermit Crab” has a number of sight words that I can use in this activity. Some of the sight words
include: but, now, so, he, you, the, like, and so many more.

Day 4: Analogizing Words

Standard/Indicator:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.D

Distinguish between similarly spelled words by identifying the sounds of the letters that differ.

Activity to Teach Analogizing Words: Word Clip

This activity is titled Word Clip and it helps students practice distinguishing between similarily
spelled words. It isn’t shown in the pictures below but the activity can be done by a student
taking a clothes pin and
clipping it to the
correct word that
matches the picture.
The first picture is
pointing to a fish’s
“fin”, the words next to
the word “fin” are
“bin” and “fun” and
both of these words are
one letter off ot the
correct answer.
Students will need to
know the sounds of the letters in order to pick the correct word. The second picture of the
worksheet is to just show other example pictures and words that can be used. This activity could
also be used as a worksheet and the students could use dot paint to pick the corrext answer
isnstead of using a clothes pin. The pictures, like the first example, could be animals or objects
from the ocean or words from my Shared Reading book, “A House for Hermit Crab”. The words
that I could use from “A House for Hermit Crab” could be for example, “crab” and then use the
words, “cab” and “crib” as similar words for the students to distinguish from.
 Focus 5: Phonics

Standard/Indicator:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3

Know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RF.K.3.B

Associate the long and short sounds with the common spellings (graphemes) for the five major
vowels.

Activity to Teach Phonics: Gone Fishing

This activity is called “Gone Fishing” and it will help the students to practice associating the
long and short sounds with the common spellings for the five major vowels. The vowels: a, e, i,
o, u. The materials needed for this activity include, a make shift rod (a pencil will work) with a
string and magnet attached to the end, along with fish cards with words on them that have either
a long or short vowel sound. Also, on the fish card, you would need a paperclip (to stick to the
magnet on the rod). Cards saying, “Short a”, “Long o”, etc. would also be needed so that the
students know what vowel sounds they are fishing for. This activity could be used for small
group activity and is a great way to get the students involved. The students would say each word
that’s on the fish card in the ocean (on top of the page) out loud and work together as a group to
see what words have the sound they are looking for. Some of the example words that they have
in the activity below are, “man”, “fat”, “pan”, “shell”, “them”, “coat”, “bite”, “home”, and
“boat”. These are great words to use because for example, once the students grasp the sound that
goes with “fat”, they will hopefully be able to read, “cat”, “bat”, “hat”, etc. This activity connects
to my Shared Reading book, “A House for Hermit Crab” because it takes place in the ocean and
the lesson for my Shared Reading book is Ocean Animals (fish). I will also use words from “A
House for Hermit Crab” in the activity, for example, “crab”, “little”, “love” and “had”.
In conclusion, all five of these activities are great practice for students building their reading
foundational skills and they all work perfectly with the book, “A House for Hermit Crab”. All of
these skills are imperative for students that are learning to read. The five focuses, alphabet
knowledge, phonological or phonemic awareness, sight words, analogizing words, and phonics
are all the building blocks for students learning to read. These activities will help each and every
student grow as a reader along with teaching them the skills that they need in order to read
independently and with ease.