WATERLOO, Iowa (AP) - The kindergartners are listening intently to a story where a curious kitten leaps onto the kitchen countertop.
The furry feline has caught the attention of these Kingsley Elementary School students. Expectations about what will happen next in the book “Skye Gets Surprised” are keeping them engaged.
And there’s one other factor: The teacher reading it to them, Kimberly Brimm, wrote the book. Skye is her cat.
“The thing that I have really enjoyed about this is that it’s just another way to get kids into reading,” she told the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier. “It’s fun for it to be a book with their teacher’s name on it.”
Brimm, a reading teacher at Kingsley, has also written two other self-published children’s books about the kitten. They are all illustrated with photos she took after her family adopted Skye at 9 weeks old last spring.
“I got a kitten in April and took excessive amounts of pictures of her,” she said.
At the same time, Brimm was looking for books that would give beginning readers more opportunities to practice what they were learning during the school shutdown early on in the pandemic. She was struggling to find enough of what her young students would like.
While some children will “read anything,” she said, others don’t get excited about reading unless they find books that are just right for them. For a lot of students, “those beginning readers can be read so quickly” that they run out of options at their level. So for those who like to read about animals, her books add a few more possibilities.
What Brimm captured through photographs during Skye’s first three months with the family help to tell the stories that she was inspired to write.
“They love nonfiction books,” teacher Amanda Wagenhoffer said of her kindergarten class, which Brimm was reading to. “They especially love books about cute little animals.”
In addition, “We’re working on our sight words, and those books are full of words they feel they’ve mastered,” she said.
Brimm has been reading the books to kindergartners and, with a lot of variation in reading levels, some children that age can read them on their own. However, they are designed for slightly older students in first- and second-grades to read themselves.
The first one, “Skye Gets Surprised,” has 101 words. The other two are beginning reader chapter books, with about 100 words in each chapter. “Zip, Zoom, Zip” has three chapters and “Skye’s Life” has four.
“It’s fun when you get to read something that has chapters and I know the words are easy enough that you can access it,” said Brimm. She introduces her young readers to the shortest story before encouraging them to tackle the chapter books. “They just get really proud when they’re done.”
As for visiting kindergarten classes with her books, she noted that the children were preparing “to write their own personal narratives.”
Wagenhoffer said they had previously done units on writing stories that are make-believe and show-and-tell, or something that’s special to them.
“We write for a purpose, an authentic purpose,” she explained. Wagenhoffer emphasizes to students that “our writing can become a book, people can read our writing.”
Starting in November, “we’ve been working on writing our own true stories,” she added. “So, when Kim wanted to share (her books), it really lined up perfectly.”
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