www.candacewhitman.com

The Night is Like an Animal

Zoo-Looking

MY FIRST COLORS (series)
         Ready for Red
         Yellow and You
         Bring on the Blue

Now it is Morning

SNOW!

Sounds of a Summer Night

Candace Whitman’s books are specifically designed for the Primary grades K-3.   The Candace Whitman collection materials/books/series are particularly suited to support fun literacy programs for K-3/Early Childhood/classroom curricula, libraries, New Performance Primary Language Arts and the Universal Pre-K program (after school/summer/vacation/professional development programs).

Reading Standards

 Reading Standard 1 - Print-sound code

Knowledge of letters and their sounds, phonemic awareness, reading words

The Candace Whitman collection (see titles above) supports students in utilizing visually engaging illustrations as an entry point (M.I.) to motivate students in developing, practicing, and enhancing their knowledge of letters and sounds, phonemic awareness, and reading word skills.

Specifically, utilizing NOW IT IS MORNING, which introduces students through real life experiences of waking up to various kinds of noises and sounds in the city, town, and farm environments, teachers can provide students with a text and captivating collage illustrations that literally contagiously engage students in the print-sound code connection.

SOUNDS OF A SUMMER NIGHT is particularly suited to providing students with not only experiencing Reading Standard 1, but also a model work for representing Writing Standards 2 and 3.

Reading Standard 2: Getting the meaning

Accuracy in fluency, self-monitoring and self-correcting strategies, comprehension

 The Candace Whitman collection is intrinsically focussed on using collage-driven paintings/Illustrations and repetitive/lyrical/sing song text to provide students with alluring approaches for getting the meaning (Standard 2).   Professional Pre-K New York City educators and ECLAS early childhood professionals can use the text of Candace Whitman’s work (including published upcoming work) as part of their ECLAS record keeping for both class itself and individual student’s progress. 

Reading Standard 3 - Reading Habits

Reading a lot, reading behaviors, discussing books, vocabulary

The Candace Whitman collection provides emergent readers, their families, classroom educators, parents, day care facilitators, after school directors and extra-curricular program leaders with rich resources to develop, nurture and enhance primary language arts Standard 3 reading habits.

With their simple, repetitive, sing-song texts, easily decodable or letter-aligned or story-telling wordless picture potential story oral language opportunities, the Candace Whitman collection encourages young children to wish to read a lot. The collection nurtures reading behaviors in that students can tell the story, look at the pictures as stories are read, and as they acquire language facility, print-sound code, word recognition, and getting to meaning abilities, model, experience and participate in reading behaviors.

With their picture-driven collage paintings, children can easily discuss the books, the pictures, how they were done, the characters in the rich pictures, particularly in the series MY FIRST COLORS which uses color as a motivating principle. Therefore teachers can use color as the focus for the children talking about and expanding on the color recognition principles that govern this series. NOW IT IS MORNING builds upon the morning concept to enrich vocabulary development.

Writing Standards

 Writing Standard 1: Habits and process

The entire Candace Whitman collection fosters, nurtures, models, and is easily adaptable as catalysts for engaging students in their own creation of similar-themed works, thus instilling in them and inculcating in them writing habit and process.

For instance, students can take the MY FIRST COLORS model works and make their own favorite color books. Even emergent students can do this by selecting a color, identifying the color from various old magazines, newspaper picture, and scrap materials and designing their own wordless picture books, involving them in the writing process.

As students’ skills, vocabulary and actual letter-writing skills expand and emerge, they can write books modeled on NOW IT IS MORNING book, by creating books about morning, afternoon, or evening. Students can also write books with the THE NIGHT IS LIKE AN ANIMAL model to create “DAY IS LIKE A…” using the prompt and style of these richly-illustrated collage-centered books. Young children can also develop books using collage art as a spatial entry point.

 Writing Standard 2: Writing purposes and resulting genres

 Sharing events, telling stories Many of the books in the Candace Whitman collection are about sharing events. In particular, with the book the NOW IT IS MORNING children can share events about mornings, afternoons, birthday parties. With ZOO-LOOKING (by Mem Fox) children can share zoo-going experiences with the parents, or visits to a museum, a garden, a store to look at wallpaper, or other family experiences.  They can also use each of Candace Whitman story prompts as springboards for telling their own stories about experiences with mommy or daddy with prompts in SNOW! (by Christine Ford) or ZOO-LOOKING.  NOW IT IS MORNING also provides prompts for telling of shared experiences of morning coming at their own houses or apartments, or when on vacation at different regional, national, or international sites.

Narrative writing These stories are rich personal narratives students can use as a prompt for their own stories using different time periods, different locations, different characters.  Stories like ZOO-LOOKING about a day spent with daddy can prompt students to narrate stories about times spent with aunt, grandmother, or special friend. They can also modified for various cultures using native and English-language learner native languages and then transferring these skills to English language usage. In cloning others, the MY FIRST COLORS is a particularly wonderful one for informing all the different objects in life and in the environment that are a particular color.

Informing others, report or informational  Again, students can use ZOO-LOOKING for a report of information on trips or with experiences with parents. SOUNDS OF A SUMMER NIGHT can be used to report on experiences of night or of summer in various locations.

Getting things done  The Candace Whitman collection involves many stories in which items are accomplished. Among these, NOW IT IS MORNING explicitly shows chores and activities accomplished by children in the morning. In YELLOW AND YOU, the simple text invites children to use yellow to create various yellow elements in their environment and expresses accomplishment on the last page. SOUNDS OF A SUMMER NIGHT shows parents finishing chores on a summer day before the day is done.

Functional Writing  Many of the Candace Whitman books can serve as advertisements telling about a particular place, such as ZOO-LOOKING which could serve to tell children and parents activities they could do together at the zoo.  Children can be encouraged to look at such books and design their own ZOO-LOOKING guides to museums, post office, library, or store. Children can produce drawings or dictate emergent language stories detailing what one would do and how one would function and do tasks at a particular location.

Producing and responding to literature

Obviously, all of the above experiences engage students in responding either through information, creating their own books, writing a poem with their own character, or through acting out plays based on a reader’s theatre, or engaging in mime based on the pictures. THE NIGHT IS LIKE AN ANIMAL can be read aloud and students can act out Night, and they can then create other works in the genre and act them out as well. in THE NIGHT IS LIKE AN ANIMAL, they can create poetry. With the teacher’s help, students can also do dialogue or readers’ theatre modeling that genre from the works.

 Writing Standard 3: Language Use and Conventions

Almost all of the Candace Whitman works are involved with style and syntax, vocabulary and word choice, spelling, punctuation, capitalization and the conventions of English. Indeed, particularly MY FIRST COLORS, the works are modeled around word blends and vocabulary word choice. Style and syntax is a key element of NOW IT IS MORNING and SOUNDS OF A SUMMER NIGHT. Spelling, punctuation, capitalization and the conventions of English are formal aspects of all books which provide students with learning models.  In particular, the question mark and exclamation point are used with repetition in the MY FIRST COLORS series.

 As has been amply demonstrated by this brief description, the Candace Whitman collection is rich and replete with opportunities for new performance language arts expansion, enhancement, nurturing and development.