Book Love: Touch the Brightest Star

During our exploration of weather we have spent a lot of time thinking about the sky, which eventually brought us to how the sky changes at night. There is so much to explore about the concepts of day and night, but this time around we focused mostly on the sky. 

Touch the Brightest Star was perfect for this focus topic.  

I adore this author, and love this interactive style of books for preschool age students. 

Read-Aloud Experience: Whenever I read interactive books like this in whole group, I think about the number of students I have and how many pages call for some sort of interaction. Depending on how those numbers play out, each student gets a turn to come up and follow the instructions, and I might use multiple children for any leftover pages. Or, I walk around and let each student "touch the brightest star," for example. Some pages also lend themselves to whole group participation, such as blowing a breeze- they can all do that from their seats. 

Connecting Activity: Paint the Night Sky

We used dark watercolors on thick paper to paint the night sky.

Then, after they had dried a bit, we added white stars using tempera paint and q-tips.

 Some papers were still pretty wet when we added the paint, which led to this blended effect, which we thought looked neat.

 Every night sky was unique and beautiful- that's the great thing about process art like this!