MY AWESOME GRANDMA
In my last blog post, I shared the educational reasons and “power” of my Silent Elephant “e” posters.
I want to let you know that included with the purchase of Phonetic Reading with Silent Elephant “e”’s posters is My Awesome Grandma picture book.
Just like my posters, My Awesome Grandma is not “just a pretty face”! I wrote it to engage children in a fun, educational, magical story promoting instant recall of the magic of consonant digraphs.
I had an incredible time creating this story and collaborating with Brandin Hurley, the illustrator, determining exactly what the book should look like page by page.
Just as I did with my Silent Elephant “e” posters, I wrote My Awesome Grandma to make the vague concept of consonant digraphs “tangible”. It can be confusing when 2 or 3 letters are combined and given a sound that is completely different from any of the individual letter sounds children learn in preschool and Kindergarten. Now, a child must disassociate their original learning of those letters’ individual sounds and give these new “sets” of letters their own unique sounds.
As I began to ponder activities to help my students get a solid grasp of consonant digraphs, I kept falling back on my own love of the “magic” of these letters that could join together and produce totally different sounds.
This made me smile. As I pondered further, the story of My Awesome Grandma emerged.
Through this “magical” story and the activities I created to go with it, my students develop a firm knowledge that when you put two or three particular consonants together to form a consonant digraph, they magically make a new sound—their own unique sound. Yes, consonant digraphs are MAGICAL!
And so is Grandma!
Brightly painted whimsical drawings of Grandma’s childhood accomplishments and her dream of becoming a dancer with the Rockettes draw children into this amusing story.
Unfortunately, Grandma wasn’t tall enough to be a Rockette, and as this reality set in, she took it upon herself to do the only thing logical, to study magic with the hopes that one day she would be able to magically make herself taller.
In the meantime, Grandma became a teacher and unexpectedly found her magic skills were especially useful in her classroom. (Wouldn’t they be!!)
Then one fateful day, while performing magic during after school hours to prevent her students’ disappointment in the outcomes of some of their science experiments, her grandson, Andrew, unexpectedly discovers that Grandma can actually change one animal into another!
At first Andrew is frightened, but soon his imagination goes wild as he “sees” ALL of the possibilities of Grandma’s magical skills! He makes a request of Grandma - to make him the tallest boy in the world, which has exciting and startling outcomes!
As I mentioned in my post about my posters, My Awesome Grandma and the activities written for it activate all parts of the brain making it easier for children to develop automatic recall of all consonant digraphs.
Children enthusiastically participate in the follow-up activities—animal mask making, play-acting using a magic hat, a magic wand, the animal masks and orange, alphabet letters that magically change their individual consonant sounds into consonant digraph sounds. The playfulness of these activities and the happiness experienced by children promote immediate recall and ensures long-term retention of the story and consonant digraphs.
With the use of the story and activities around the story, children relax and enjoy the “magic” of something becoming something different. They let their imagination play and they let consonant digraphs “make sense” in the process.
For more information about My Awesome Grandma, feel free to contact us. You can purchase My Awesome Grandma separately. Click here for the store.
Linda Katherine Smith-Jones Nina Henson