I Can Help

I Can Help by David Hyde Costello was one that jumped in my bag at Cover to Cover and then I just discovered it was in my shopping cart at Amazon after I read Franki's post at A Year of Reading back in March. I couldn't agree more with her positive review of this book.

This book is perfect for our youngest readers. My first thought is to use this book at the beginning of the year with my kindergartners to guide us in a discussion about helping. What does that look like in a room of twenty friends? How do we show we are helping? The animals in this text are great role models and could easily get our thinking going. I don't think any classroom can survive if students and teachers aren't helping each other. The animals are also able to help due to something they are good at, a feature unique to them maybe. For example, the sunbird is able to use it's beak to remove a splinter from gorilla's thumb. We all have special talents that make us more helpful in different situations. This book would be a great revisit for when we are learning the sight word can. The repetitive phrase, I can help will help us see can over and over in print. Providing the repetition young readers in a quality text.

Katie over at Creative Literacy posted about this I Can Help earlier in the week, we were shopping together.