This adorably illustrated book brings a wonderful real-life example of what it means to share. It is about an elephant who debates whether or not he should share his ice cream with his best friend, Piggy. In the end, he waits so long that his ice cream melts, but Piggy shows up with a sweet surprise to cheer him up.  I love that this book also shows the value of friendship and how to share at a level that kids can relate to. Some great activities for this book could be to have students write a narrative about friends sharing, or have students make an ice cream cone and write what they value about a friend, and then share that cone. This book would also be good to jump into adjectives with. 

Grade Level: K-2

Lexile Measure: 260L

This colorful book takes a spin on ways to give children confidence. Bobbette, the school bully picks on everyone, especially, Winston. One classmate learns the reasoning behind Bobbette's mean behaviors and receives advice from her mom to chew a bully bean and confront this bully. In a twist of events, Bobbette befriends her classmates and they all learn to get along. This book would be great to use at the beginning of the year to help with anti-bullying education. Some great activities for this book would be to make a class poster and write ways to deal with bullies, allow students to take "bully beans" (jelly beans) and for every bean they get, they will have to come up with a way to deal with bullies. 

Grade Level: Pre-K-5th

ATOS reading level: 3.6  

I love The Giving Tree and would recommend it to anyone! This book is on a second grade reading level for AR. There are many different lessons that a teacher could use for this book, for example series of events. For example, in what order did the tree give away its' parts. 

This is a good book that kids enjoy and have fun with if the teacher really gets into reading it. I would recommend having this in your classroom library for any teacher from kindergarten through second grade. As a class I would want to do an activity for either kindergarten or first grade. I would give each child a role then when reading the book they would have to stand up for whatever role they received. (example: stand up and make a snake's hiss when the teacher reads that part). Then I would group them together having one of each animal in the group and have the students place them in the correct order based off the book.   

I would recommend this book for kindergarten. It's a cute little book about a pig named Olivia. This book goes through Olivia's day and can easily be used for a some sort of class lesson plan. One activity could be having the students come up with a graph as a class (since this is kindergarten).One side could be activities that Olivia actually did and the other side could be activities pretended that she did in her head. This book could also provided many art activities that a teacher could come up with to complete with the chart group work.