It Looked Like Spilt Milk, a Rewrite

The essential questions for this unit of study are:

How does reading help me become a better writer?

What can I learn from other authors and illustrators?

How can I make use of the craft of other authors and illustrators in my writing and drawing?

It Looked Like Spilt Milk

by

Charles G. Shaw

This week we studied the text, It Looked Like Spilt Milk by Charles G. Shaw. This choice is for the following reasons:

· This is a text most students know and love (familiarity and prior knowledge)

· The structure is obvious (repeating phrases on each page)

· The illustrations are large silhouettes.

· Text and pictures match (emphasizing picture-word match)

· There is a surprise ending. (“It was just a cloud in the sky.”)

· When our class rewrites the text, the format (structure) will be easy to replicate.

Monday-Teacher read the book and students listened.

Tuesday-Teacher and students read the book together. The students were asked to lie on the floor looking up at the ceiling. They were told to imagine they were looking at the sky. Then they were asked, “Have you ever seen a cloud that looks like an object?” Students sat back up and recounted the times they had seen clouds that looked like something else.

Thursday-Students read the book chorally. Students were asked to come up with ideas about adapting the ideas from this text to write their own texts. They offered three possibilities as a lead for the story.

1) It looked like strawberry juice

2) It looked like chocolate pudding

3) It looked like melted ice cream

We discussed each possibility as the lead. The class voted to use, It Looked Like Chocolate Pudding. Students made the decision to eliminate the word sometimes from their text.

Friday-Students read the book chorally with a student helper using the pointer and a student helper turning the pages.

Students brainstormed a list of objects that would be easy to draw and paint brown. I recorded the list on chart paper. I passed out lap white boards. Students practiced drawing a silhouette of an object of their choice.

We scripted the book as follows:

It looked like chocolate pudding.

But it wasn’t chocolate pudding.

It looked like an apple.

But it wasn’t an apple.

It looked like a pumpkin.

But it wasn’t a pumpkin.

It looked like a crescent moon.

But it wasn’t a crescent moon.

It looked like an orange.

But it wasn’t an orange.

It looked like a star.

But it wasn’t a star.

It looked like a Venus flytrap.

But it wasn’t a Venus flytrap.

I looked like a leaf.

But it wasn’t a leaf.

It looked like a butterfly.

But it wasn’t a butterfly.

It looked like a pear.

But it wasn’t a pear.

It looked like an ipod.

But it wasn’t an ipod.

It looked like a dinosaur.

But it wasn’t a dinosaur.

It looked like a heart.

But it wasn’t a heart.

It looked like a ghost.

But it wasn’t a ghost.

It looked like a banana.

But it wasn’t a banana.

It looked like a soccer ball.

But it wasn’t a soccer ball.

It looked like a dragon.

But it wasn’t a dragon.

It was just a mud puddle on the ground!

Once students were comfortable drawing their silhouette, they drew their final copy on a half page of tag board. Each student used brown paint to fill their object in.

We had less discussion about the content of the book and the author’s intent this week. This text is very simple and I felt we had already worked that line of questioning quite well with the previous texts.