Think For Yourself (Part 2)

The Chickens Build a Wall
by Jean-François Dumont
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2013
review copy provided by the publisher

Life in the barnyard was business-as-usual until the hedgehog showed up. No one had ever seen a hedgehog before. Rooster capitalized on the fear and suspicion of the stranger and rallied his hens to begin building a wall to protect them from the hedgehog. They worked and worked, built higher and higher.

Finally, when winter came and the wall was so high that they could just about not see the sky, Rooster declared the wall to be high enough to protect them.

Then, rustling out from under a pile of hay in the corner of the walled-in barnyard where he had been sleeping through the wall-building, came the hedgehog. And the hens discovered they had forgotten to build a door in the wall.

Can you guess what happened when the hens and the hedgehog had to spend time together and get to know each other? Can you guess what happened to the wall?

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Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris are the amazing duo behind Burkins & Yaris (check out the Common Core (blog) and Early Literacy (Think Books) resources on their website) who have created LiteracyHead and WordEyes -- sites that teach, well, Literacy and Words (Vocabulary) through the arts. They have created a shiny new group of vocabulary words from The Chickens Build A Wall on WordEyes.

Click here to check out this freshly minted batch of vocabulary words-taught-through-art.

You'll see the word, with the definition hidden, but just a click away. Then below the word are four works of art in order from the most concrete representation of the word to the most abstract, with the fourth picture being a non-example. Click on the first work of art and it will come up in a hover-window that allows you to navigate directly to the next work of art.

Life has gotten complicated and busy in 5th grade this week, so I haven't shared either The Chickens Build a Wall OR the WordEyes words with my students. Stop by next week for a follow-up post about how my students reacted to/interacted with WordEyes and The Chickens Build a Wall.