Text Talk Tuesday & Very Important Fundraising

Here is a brand new blog segment for you… Text Talk Tuesday!

What on Earth is that, you may ask? Simple – on Tuesdays (hopefully every week, at least every fortnight) I’m going to share one of my favourite picturebooks with you AND provide a free, and fun, book activity to go with it.

To kick of this fab new blog post, I’m going to start with one of my newest favourite picturebooks… Pete the Cat!

If you don’t know this book, you may have been living under a rock! Ok, not really… but since I started branching out in the blogging world around here, I can’t go anywhere without hitting a Pete the Cat reference or resource. I’ve even introduced him to all my Aussie teaching colleagues.

Anyway. Moving right along…

Pete the Cat is a FABULOUS book that is all about teaching children resilience.

Last year when I first purchase Pete the Cat, we read it about 3 times the day it arrived. And we listened to the free song. Over. And Over. And Over.

This year, I introduced my beautiful Preps/Firsties to Pete on the first day of school – Pete the Cat, Rocking in my School Shoes. Appropriate, right? And then had to read all the other books straight away (although I drew the line at Pete’s Christmas – it was only February!).

We’ve since revisited these books many times, because they’re a favourite, because they’ve got fantastic illustrations, and because the kiddos relate to the books.

Whenever something happens in the classroom that one kiddo doesn’t think is fair, all I have to say is ‘Do we get upset?’ The rest of the Little Smarties sit up straight and reply, ‘Goodness, no!’

(A few then proceed to sing one of  Pete’s songs, and I have to get them under control again!)

One of my book activities for Pete the Cat is a simple class book that my Grade 1s completed in the first week of term – you can see it in the first picture, right next to the official Pete book!

My Little Smarties brainstormed a list of colours and items that were those colours, and created their own page of the Pete story, substituting Pete’s name for theirs. I just love some of their illustrations!

I’m a big fan of class books – either making up a brand new story based on a book, collating responses to books, or using the story and only changing a few words. They make for fabulous (and CHEAP) additions to classroom libraries and the kids get a kick out of reading their own work… and being able to read the book independently.

So, today I have a copy of my class book for your download for free to use with your kids (should you choose to). It follows the same storyline as Pete the Cat I Love My White Shoes, and involves tracing and filling in the missing words. (There’s an Aussie spelling and a US spelling sheet included!) Click on the image below to download the file from Google Drive. (I also have another pack of book response sheets for ‘cat-themed’ books that you can download for free here.)

Leave a comment if you download and let me know what you think!

And, even though this post is a bit longer than I anticipated I’m also going to talk about a really great fundraiser going on at the moment.

In February this year, Bundaberg East State School (in Queensland, Australia), was under water as a result of tropical cyclone Oswald hitting the state of Queensland. It was right before school was due to start for the year and was so devastating to hear about.

Mel (From the Pond) teamed up with Jody, a teacher from TPT, who works at Bundaberg East State School and together they devised a way to raise money to help support the teachers and students as they rebuild their teaching resources. You can read a great post with more details from Mel, here. You can read Jody’s Post here.

Lots of teachers got together to donate resources to support these teachers, and now they’ve been put together into a fantastic SUPER PACK of 22 resources for K-2 classes to raise money for the school. There’s over 550 pages worth of activities included for only $15 which is a total bargain!

I really urge everyone to get behind this fundraiser – I can’t wait to purchase it myself!

22 packs for only $15.  Love it!

Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I apologise for the length of the post!