Flying

Book Cover of "Flying" by Donald Crews

The second book in the Donald Crews book study that I would like to talk about is Flying.

This is a great book for discussing sequencing.  It also illustrates, through pictures, the process of boarding a plane, lifting off, what you see when you're flying, and the landing process.  The book is a little old-fashioned, because of course it shows the plane from Donald Crews' perspective when he was little.  My kindergarten kids really thought it was a cool book, though.

I made two papers for two different days that were very successful.  The one idea was a writing paper with a picture and a word bank, where the students could use sentence starters to write their own story about getting on a plane:

Airport Writing Prompt by Sharon A Blachowicz Dudley on Scribd

I came up with some easy-to-read sentence starters that my kids have used since January to help them in their writing.  I laminate these posters for each table, and they keep them in a bucket in the middle of the table, that they can pull out at any time.  It really helps them to not keep writing "I see" a thousand times:

Sentence Starters by Sharon A Blachowicz Dudley on Scribd

The second paper that I came up with is for them to write about a place they would go to on their airplane.  This was so open-ended, it made for great conversation!  Some kids told me they would fly to Mexico.  Some told me they would fly to an island in the middle of an ocean; that was very popular.  Others mentioned locations such as New York, Texas, and Florida.  One little girl told me she would fly on an airplane to see her grandma, because that's the person she loves the most.  That was so sweet!  The conversations before they wrote were so rich that it was actually hard to get to the writing.  The kids wanted to keep talking about where they wanted to fly!

Donald Crews Flying Prompts by Sharon A Blachowicz Dudley on Scribd


Here are some samples of my kids' writing:

I'd love to hear from you about your favorite Donald Crews book!