Don't Use Up All Your Wiggles Book Review

During summer school students should get a breather from the work they put into their learning.  In my school district, library time happens to fill up one of those "brain break" times in the schedule once a week.  To keep with the theme of having students move around, I decided to use either brain break videos or stories with movement.

Doreen Cronin's book, Wiggle, makes for a nice "brain break" read aloud.  I read this to younger students at the summer school locations where I'm the librarian and the kids thoroughly enjoyed the book.  Being able to get your wiggles out is important and when a book tells you to do it during story time...well, take advantage!

The book focuses on a dog who wiggles his way around from morning till night.  The interactive dialogue makes this book both verbally and kinesthetically successful.  Some pages are simple statements while other pages ask the readers questions.  The illustrations help the reader visualize the actions.  

I combined this book with the song "Wiggle It" by Patty Shukla:

We also did an activity suggested by the Bounce and Wiggle guide: what sound does the animal make?  I transferred pictures of the animals to a flipchart to be displayed on a Promethean board--added relevant habitat backgrounds, typed in the noises of the animals and set the text to completely transparent.  This way kids could make the animal sound from their own background knowledge and then I just switch the text back to solid--it's kind of a cool effect.  

To keep with the movement theme, next will be Bounce and Stretch by Doreen Cronin.