Objectives:

• Students will respond to literature through a variety of activities including choral, art, music.

• Students will identify relevant supporting details and arrange events in chronological order.

• Students will produce sounds and letters by writing letters and matching letters and sounds.

• Students will use initial sounds to represent word structure.

Time Required:

• 3 - One hour sessions

Vocabulary:

• country

• city

• overalls

• fancy

• plain

• simple

• noisy

• quiet

Materials:

• The City Mouse and the Country Mouse

• Pictures/photos of country scenes and city scenes (i.e., animals, skyscrapers, buildings, barn, roads, busy streets, cars, ponds, tractors, taxis, people, planes, buses, etc.)

• Large cutout out of tag board or construction paper of a cottage and a skyscraper

• Internet

• KidPix

• Items that begin with the hard C and and the soft C sounds (i.e., cookie, car, coin, camera, camel, celery, circle, circus, cereal, cymbals, etc.

• Letter C and picture cards of /c/ sound

• Any software that can create Invitations

Procedures:

• Show the cover and read the title of story.  Make predictions and discuss what the story might be about. Take a picture walk making some predictions.  Build background by displaying pictures of the country and the city for students to compare.  Ask various questions such as where would they see me more people; more cars; more trees and plants?  Are there things you could do in one place that you couldn't do in the other? Which place is more like the area they live in?  Read story.

• Discuss and respond to story.   Discuss what happened in the beginning, in the middle and in the end of the story; the characters, setting, problem and solution.

• Discuss the differences between the city and the country in the story.  Compare the surroundings that are specific to each location and tell why some of the items from the story belong in either the city or the country.  For example, would a mouse living in the country have a large fancy dining room?  Would a mouse from the city have a small, cozy living room?

• Pass out the picture cards with the country and city scenes and have students sort the cards by city or country placing them on either the cottage or the skyscraper cutouts.  Encourage students to discuss why they placed the cards on either cutout.  Compare the posters and discuss how they were categorized.

• Use the city and the country to develop awareness of the two different sounds of the letter C.  Use the story and point to the words city and country.  Write each word in a separate column on the board or on chart paper underlining the letter C in each word.  Ask students how both words can start with the same letter but sound differently.  Lead students to conclude that the letter C has two sounds:  hard /k/ and soft /s/.   Use the items beginning with C.  Have students name each object and help decide whether the sound is the soft C like in city or the hard C like in country.   Write the objects name in the corresponding column with an illustration.

Evaluation:

• Using KidPix, students will create two scenes.  One for the country and one for the city.  Students will write a sentence:  "I saw ______ in the country.";  "I saw _____ in the city."  They will type and complete each sentence and illustrate each scene with the drawing tools to correlate with their sentence.  Print out students work and bind pages together to make two class books:   Country Life! and City Sights!
• Students will be evaluated on the sentence and illustrations.  You can visit rubistar.4teachers.org for an example of a rubric or to create your own.

Extension Activities:

• Students can make invitations inviting either of the mice to come over to their school using any program that can create invitations.
• Students can listen to The City Mouse and the Country Mouse on-line storybook.

Home Learning:

• For home learning, have students fold a piece of paper in half to create two columns.  Have them draw a small picture of a skyscraper in one column and label it city and a picture of a barn and tress and label it country underlining the "c" in each word.   Students will draw three pictures in each column with the correct C sound; the hard and the soft.  If students have a clip art program at home they can look for pictures there.  Students can also try to use the sounds they know to spell the words for their illustration.