When my kids were little, we didn’t have electronics, etc. (except for our beloved GeoSafari and MathSafari!), so gift giving was a little simpler. We did, however, give a balance of educational items and fun items (just like I am doing with my grandbabies!). Our kids loved school and learning, so they looked forward to getting “school” things for Christmas besides the many wonderful toys we got them–for the most part. We had a couple who didn’t love school as much as the others (though we still had high expectations for them!), so I understand the need to make learning more fun for some kiddos! Enter my two readers/coloring books. I am excited about these print books (available from Amazon) as they have the fun of exciting, well-known stories and coloring pages AND text that can be used for reading aloud to the child or as a reader for them.

Above are some links to books I use and love. I am an affiliate for Amazon.com. If you click on the links I will earn a small commission. Thank you for your support of this blog!

I published two of these in the last year—Read and Color, Mowgli and Read and Color, Beauty & Beast. They both have these great benefits:

+The engaging text is perfect for emerging readers to practice their word calling skills. However, the text is detailed enough to actually discuss and learn from—thus, building comprehension skills.

+Each one provides the perfect opportunity for parents and grandparents to read aloud to their favorite children—before or after the coloring pages are colored with crayons, markers, or colored pencils.

+Both are available in print and download form.

And….here are the descriptions of each book! You won’t be disappointed in these engaging coloring books!

Color and Read, Beauty & Beast

This lovely coloring book and reader is 45 pages long. The engaging text is perfect for emerging readers to practice their word calling skills. However, the text is detailed enough to actually discuss and learn from—thus, building comprehension skills. Section I contains the a short story of the original Beauty and the Beast story at a second to third grade reading level. Section II introduces children to the characters, giving funny and cute information about each one in a short paragraph that is perfect for reading aloud and for discussion.

Finally, Section III teaches new readers about the types of castles that were popular during the Middle Ages. These short passages are perfect for reading and for writing from. The pictures are delightful! Students will love coloring the scenes from the original story. They will have fun with the individual character pictures in Section II.

Lastly, kids will be challenged with the detailed castle pictures in Section III. Delightful pictures to color coupled with appropriate, yet challenging text, will engage your young student for many hours. The pictures are also appropriate for the pre-reader.

This book provides the perfect opportunity for parents and grandparents to read aloud to their favorite children—before or after the coloring pages are colored with crayons, markers, or colored pencils.

This book is available for purchase in print and download form.

Click here to preview the coloring book!

Color and Read, Mowgli

The Color and Read, Mowgli! book is a 66 page reader, coloring book, and story book all in one! It is a product in our Book-Movie-Book line-up, which contains books and materials based on an old book that is a modern-day movie. This series is a fun way to get children interested in old books—watch the movie; read the original (or a version of it) book; and read, write, or color in/about the movie/book with one of our BMB products!

Color and Read, Mowgli! is much more than a coloring book! The whimsical, detailed pictures will definitely delight young artists. However, another benefit is the two texts that are provided—a larger, bold-font text for a young reader to read to himself or aloud to someone for reading practice and a smaller-font, more detailed text for adults to read to the child.

Section I contains “Meet the Characters,” pictures, beginning reader text, and advanced reader text about the characters in The Jungle Book. Section II contains “The Story.” Full page pictures and the two text levels fill this delightful section.

This book is available in print and download form.

Click here to preview the coloring book!

P.S. What do your kids like to color with? What are your favorite educational coloring books right now? My kids used to love the Dover ones!

The post Two Coloring Book Readers: Mowgli and/or Beauty and the Beast appeared first on Character Ink.

I am so excited about my preposition book! (Yes, I get super excited about grammar!)

And I’m doubly excited that you (our subscribers!) get to see it and use it—for FREE! (Scroll down below to subscribe and get it free until June 15th!)

Aboard, about, above. along, among, around….

Whether your kids sing them, recite them, chant them, rap them, or write them…prepositions are important.

I learned them in chant-like form when I was in school. However, I never knew WHY I needed to learn them.

My downloadable product will teach kids prepositions—in a way that focuses on the WHY, that is, what prepositions really do!

AND with the fun story line of the beloved Beauty and the Beast characters.

Our kids (and we!) need to learn prepositions for a few important reasons:

(1) They are the beginning of prepositional phrases

(2) Prepositional phrases can be mentally eliminated from a sentence in order to get to the bare bones of the sentence…since the sentence’s main subject and main verb are not usually found in prepositional phrases, This concept is imperative for subject-verb agreement solutions.

(3) Prepositional phrases are good to use as openers—especially lengthy ones—as they vary sentence structure and rhythm.

I’m all about songs, jingles, rhymes, recitation, and mnemonics for learning parts of speech (and really anything). (My books are full of them—FANBOYS for coordinating conjunctions; Be, a Helper, Link Verbs song; Preposition Check Sentences; Subordinate Clause Opener rhyme; and much more!)

However, when prepositions are learned in songs or recitations, the real reasons for prepositions are overlooked. (Not to mention that they learn about thirty of the over two hundred prepositions….not enough memorized preps to adequately recognize them in sentences and use them for sentence openers!)

That is, students can chant a long list of words, but they do not know how to use them.

(In addition to this book, you can learn more about teaching prepositions in these blog posts, “Why Learn (or Teach!) Prepositions” and “Teaching Prepositions.”)

Enter my Beauty and the Beast Preposition Practice! I use tricks. I use check sentences. I even use toys—a character from the book/movie AND a large castle—to teach prepositions (and practice them).

If you are not subscribed and would like this FREE book download, subscribe here!

Students can use either the black and white “toys” or the colored ones (a large castle and six beloved characters from Beauty and the Beast). Consider how much faster it will be for your kids to learn prepositions with these learning tools:

Beast ran _______________ the castle.

1. aboard – Beast ran aboard the castle.
2. about – Beast ran about the castle.
3. above – Beast ran above the castle.
4. across – Beast ran across the castle.
5. across from – Beast ran across from the castle.
6. behind the castle – Beast ran behind the castle.
7. below the castle – Beast ran below the castle.
8. beneath the castle – Beast ran beneath the castle.
9. beside the castle – Beast ran beside the castle.
10. by the castle – Beast ran by the castle.

But all of the methods within this Beauty and the Beast Preposition Practice have one thing in common: they focus on the PURPOSE of the preposition—to show spatial relationships or time.

This 100+ page downloadable book has eighteen lessons (with student assignments) introducing prepositions in a systematic order: initial letter, with the castle and characters, as opposites, as synonyms, as compound words, with time, and more.

This book also has a jam-packed Appendix section:

Appendix A: Colored and Black and White Beauty and the Beast Pictures to Use for
Student’s Preposition Practice

Appendix B: Think Fast Quiz Preposition Practice for Beginning and
Intermediate Students

Appendix C: Think Fast Quiz Preposition Practice for Advanced Students

Appendix D: Complete Preposition Lists in Categories and in Total (over ten pages of preposition lists!)

When you use this packet, your students will learn prepositions by the boatload—but they will also learn them for their purpose—and have fun as they do!

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Writing ideas. Writing prompts. Writing suggestions.

These are the things that cause children who do not know *how* to write to hate writing.

And it is often what we do to kids in an effort to get the writing. But they do not work for these kinds of kids.

So what works?

Very specific, detailed writing instruction! (See Cathy Duffy’s review of MC here…)

One of the tools that we use in grades two through six or so is Joshua’s amazing Writing Boxes.

Check out the video of me teaching from our new ones that will be out in our Write On, Belle and Beast books at the end of February!

Books that contain Writing Boxes:

Write On, Mowgli — Level I

Write On, Mowgli — Level II

Jungle Book Writing Boxes

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I’m excited to announce a new downloadable product that is super user-friendly and effective!  And…..it’s based on the story of Beauty and the Beast, so it’s super fun too!

I’ll give you the details of the product in a little bit, but I want to let you know how you can get your hands on this resource first.

If you are a subscriber of Character Ink blog, you will automatically get it in our Freebie Friday! (How cool is that?) Yep, I’m giving you a fifty-plus-page e-book to use with your students completely free (for a limited time!).

If you are not a subscriber and/or you are reading this blog post after the freebie has ended, you can still get ahold of this product at Teachers Pay Teachers, CurrClick, or Character Ink Store!

So now for the deets….

Beauty and the Beast Checklist Challenge is a downloadable e-book that walks students (and teachers!) through the first three-fourths of Language Lady’s effective Checklist Challenge. The Checklist Challenge is a “challenging checklist” of tasks that help students go through their writing, one task at a time, and revise, edit, add to, embellish, and improve.

The Checklist Challenge has the following characteristics/benefits:

(1) Each task is given separately (i.e. not just a big master list with no explanation). The tasks are explained and samples are provided.

(2) The checklist has check boxes (one per paragraph) for each essay/report/story that you can customize to a certain project. It is clear that a paper has four paragraphs, so most of the task should be done four times— once per paragraph.

(3) The tasks are skills learned in grammar. Once a child learns how to use quotations, he should practice them immediately by putting them in his writing. The Checklist Challenge marries grammar and writing in a way that other programs do not.

(4) Coding instructions are given so that a student can be taught to code his additions and revisions for easyteacher-grading.

And so much more.

This book is chock full of learning! There is a thorough sample essay that has all of the CC revisions penned into it and coded to teach you and your student how this is done. There is an essay given for the student to use to complete the Checklist Challenge. However, there is also instruction in how to write your own Beauty and the Beast essay to complete the Checklist Challenge on (if desired). Finally, there is an extra Checklist Challenge for you to print off and use with future essays, stories, and reports.

This book will teach you how to use Language Lady’s Checklist Challenge to improve all of your writing. It will show you step-by-step how to make changes that improve your writing drastically. It is very directed—meaning that you will not have to guess what to do next or how to change something or how to improve something. You will become a pro at the Checklist Challenge (for the essay in this book as well as future essays) after you finish with this book!

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It’s finally happening! I am finished with the Write On, Beauty and Beast books (five books; five levels; downloadable AND print books)—and they are going up at my stores!

Yay! That makes five Write On, Mowgli! books; five Write On, Beauty and Beast! books (by the end of next week); and two Write On, Peter Pan! books (with the other three coming the first of April). Check out the description of the Write On! books here.

The first one available is the Junior High book, and I love it! I have been testing the assignments with our one hundred cottage class students over the past two semesters, and it has been a blast!

This Level III book is designed for junior high students and contains the following projects (from pre-writing through final product with all the instruction and skills needed for each assignment): Expanded Writing Boxes With Beauty and Beast Story and Original Essay of Three Castle Objects You Would Choose as Friends.

Can someone say FUN and CUTE!?

So you might be wondering what makes these books (or any of my writing books) different from other writing books…I’m glad you asked!

There are a few secrets to my books’ success in getting kids to write (and like it!):

1) Interesting topics—Um, yeah, our Book-Movie-Book line up of books contains super interesting topics

2) Directed Writing Approach—never a writing idea book; never starters; never vague instructions about what a student should do…but hand-holding, step-by-step instructions that take a student from idea to final product with all of the steps in between

3) Skill Building along the way—I don’t ask students to write a type of paper that contains certain things without also teaching the skills that are needed to complete that project. (Have you ever had an assignment in which a student was supposed to include a quotation but the assignment didn’t actually teach the student how to write with quotations? So sorry!)

Each project in all of my books has detailed samples for students to see how the project was written by another student and in depth lessons of all of the skills needed in order to complete that project.

In the case of Write On, Beauty and Beast III, the following skills/lessons are taught in the two writing projects (Writing Boxes and Three Castle Friends Essay):

1. Sentence by Sentence Writing Boxes for Beauty and Beast, including adding describers to each sentence and ending with multiple paragraph writing (and extensive Answer Keys)

2. Brainstorming Boxes and organizing material for castle friends

3. Research objects in a castle

4. Quotation inclusion

5. Notetaking from source

6. Transition lessons

7. Paragraph Writing From Notes

8. Thesis Statement

9. Thesis Statement Reloaded; and more!

Each write on book (five Mowgli, two Peter Pan, and two Beauty and Beast) has sample pages. Check them out! See if my new downloadable AND print short books might work for you!

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