(bright music) - Hey, welcome to Camp Read-A-Lot.

I'm Mrs Hammack.

I'm so excited you're here at camp.

Camp's a great time for learning and having fun.

At Camp Read-A-Lot we're gonna spend our days reading, and talking, and singing, and learning, and enjoying all kinds of activities together that will help us to grow and be strong readers.

Parents when you're reading at home, you can ask your kids questions about the stories that you're reading to them, or even if they're reading to you, or even if you're reading completely separate things.

Start a conversation about the stories that they're reading.

Who are the characters in your story?

What's the problem in the story?

Where does the story take place?

How does the character feel about something in the story?

Or how did the character change at the end of the story?

These are all great questions to talk with your kids about as they're reading and to deepen their comprehension and their attention to detail as they read the stories this summer, and you'll notice a huge improvement in their comprehension as they start the school year in the fall.

Just some ideas that I hope will be helpful to you.

All right, campers are you ready to get started?

♪ Hello readers ♪ ♪ Hello writers ♪ ♪ Hello campers ♪ ♪ I'm glad you're here today ♪ ♪ Hello readers ♪ ♪ Hello writers ♪ ♪ Hello campers ♪ ♪ I'm glad you're here today ♪ All right, campers let's get ready for our pledge.

Get your scout salute ready and repeat after me.

On my honor, I will try my best to be kind to everyone.

To have a smile on my face and a song in my heart.

Great for you.

It's hard sometimes to be kind to everyone, isn't it?

But that's okay.

We still give it our best try and sometimes we might mess that up, we just start again, okay?

All right, great.

All right, I have a great game for us today that will help to train our ears for sound in this lovely, beautiful woods at Camp Read-A-Lot, but I need my helper.

I was overlooking at the barbecue where he left a huge mess from his snack the other night.

And I think that's why he's disappeared again.

He didn't wanna have to clean up after himself.

Can you help me look for him?

I wonder if he's hiding in my backpack.

Let me look.

Scooter!

Oh, scooter.

Scooter it's time, the campers are here, they're waiting.

We're gonna run out of... What are you doing?

You're getting a drink of water.

Well, okay.

But you know that, that canteen is for when we go on hikes, when we don't have water.

You don't need to drink out of the canteen when we're here in camp.

Okay.

Are you ready?

Okay.

Today we're gonna play the sound changer game.

I am going to tell you a word and then we're gonna change the beginning sound to make a new word.

You ready to give it a try?

I think this might be a new game for us.

So let's have a seat here.

Here is my word, I broke it apart into the beginning sound and the rest of the word.

We call that the onset and then the rhyme.

Are you ready?

Here we go.

My word is fish.

F-ish fish.

Okay, Now, are you ready?

Let's change the /f/ in fish.

Let's change that to /d/.

So what would my new word be?

Yes, you got it, good.

D-ish.

Dish.

Great, good job.

Wow, that was fantastic.

Okay, you ready to try another one?

Okay, it's a little bit trickier.

Here is my word.

S-ea, sea.

Like as in the ocean, sea.

Okay.

All right, now we're gonna put a blend in front.

So instead of the /s/ for see, I want you to change it to /tr/.

What do you think?

Tr-ee.

Tree.

Great job.

Wow!

You are good at this game.

This might be something you can play at home.

All right, let's try another one, are you ready?

Tool.

Tool.

T-oo-l. Tool.

Okay, now we're going to put a blend in the front.

Are you ready?

What if I change t-oo-l, tool to sch-oo-l. School.

Great.

Good thinking.

Okay, our story today is about the sea, the ocean, and I have the perfect joke for you.

Are you ready?

Okay, here we go.

What kind of fish comes out at night?

What kind of fish comes up at night?

Do you know?

Can you think of it?

A starfish?

Get it, the stars come out at night.

Yeah.

No.

Well, I thought it was great, a starfish.

They don't really come out at night, but it goes with the nighttime sky and the stars.

Good one.

All right, are you ready for our catch of the day.

You are?

Oh, no.

Okay, maybe later.

All right, sit down right there.

Okay, now it's time for our catch of the day.

We have four words today to help us with our story.

And these are story words that we're gonna talk about.

So this word says setting, setting.

The setting is the place where the story is happening.

Where are they?

All right.

And then I have... Oh, let's do this one first.

Problem, problem.

A problem is something hard that the character, or that has to be fixed or a problem that they have, something hard that they have to do.

Okay.

Then solution is how the problem got solved.

What did the character do to solve the problem?

And then last we have conclusion.

A conclusion is the end of the story.

All right.

So we're gonna talk about the setting, the problem, the solution, and the conclusion today in our story when we get ready to do our reading power chart.

Okay.

Today our story is one of my favorites.

This is about friendship.

Just like, yes, the spider and the fly, "The Diary of a Spider."

This story also highlights friendship.

And so we'll be thinking about that as we read "Big Al."

And this story is by Andrew Clements Yoshi, and he also did the illustrations for this story.

Great.

That might be something you wanna do.

Maybe you wanna grow up and be an author illustrator and do both.

Take a look at that cover.

Okay, I'm excited to see what's going on.

Now, remember this is the front cover and the back cover, we have the spine is the very end part.

And then look how pretty that is.

Wow!

Beautiful.

There's the, what's that called?

Title page.

Good for you.

All right, let's jump in and see what happens with Big Al.

In the wide blue sea there was a very friendly fish named Big Al, you could not find a nicer fish.

But Big Al was also very very scary.

Why do you think the author said he was scary?

If he's nice, how can he be scary?

Right.

He's kind of scary looking, isn't he?

Other fish seem to have at least one friend, some of them had many friends.

But Big Al, he had no friends.

He did not really blame the other fish.

How could he expect a little fish to trust a great big fish with eyes and skin and teeth like his.

So Big Al was lonely and he cried big salty tears into the big salty sea.

It's sad, that he doesn't have any friends.

Look at his face, can you tell him with the illustration that he sad?

What tells you he sad?

And look at his eyes.

Oh, look and he has a little frown.

Yeah.

But Big Al really wanted friends, so he worked on it.

First he tried wrapping himself up in seaweed.

He thought it was a great disguise, but nobody else did.

Who wants to stop and talk to a floating plant with big sharp teeth.

Then he thought that if he puffed himself up round, the other fish would laugh and see how clever and silly he could be.

But all they saw was how big he could be, and they steered clear.

Very early one morning, Big Al went down to the bottom and flopped and wiggled himself into the sand until he was almost covered up.

He looked much smaller.

And when the other fish came near, Big Al talked and joked with them, he had a delightful time.

But then one scratchy little grain of sand got stuck in his gills, and he, and he, he, (sneezing) he sneezed.

And when the cloud of sand cleared away, all of the other fish were gone.

Big Al even changed his color one day so that he could look like he belonged to a school of tiny fish passing by.

He bumbled along with them for a while, laughing and feeling like he was just one of the crowd.

But he was so big and clumsy that when all the tiny fish darted to the left and then quickly back to the right, Big Al just plowed straight ahead.

He went and bumping and thumping right into the little fish.

And before he could even say, excuse me, they were gone.

And he was all alone again.

Sadder than ever.

Just when Big Al was starting to be sure that he would never have a single friend, something happened.

He was floating along sadly watching some of the smaller fish and was wishing that they would come closer.

As he watched a net dropped down silently from above.

And in an instant, they were caught.

What do you think?

How do you think he feels about that?

Big Al forgot all about being lonely, he forgot all about being sad.

His eyes bulged out bigger and rounder than ever.

And with a mighty flip of his tail, he opened his mouth and charged straight at the net.

The net was strong, but Big Al was stronger.

He ripped right through it, and all the little fish rushed out through the hole.

When Big Al tried to turn around and go out of the hole, he got tangled up in the net, and he was stuck.

The net went higher and higher toward the bright surface of the light, and the little fish watched as Big Al disappeared above them.

When the little fish were able to speak again, all they talked about was the huge wonderful fish that had saved them.

How great to be free, but what a shame for that big fellow, he'd been caught.

Just then there was a tremendous crashing splash above them and small fish darted away.

Oh no, what's it the net again?

Not at all.

It was Big Al.

Those fishermen took one look at him and threw him right back into the ocean.

And now there is one huge puffy, scary, fierce looking fish in the sea who has more friends than anyone else.

It's Big Al.

Isn't that a great story?

Wow, that is so awesome.

You know, sometimes we make a judgment about how someone looks without ever giving them a chance to show us who they are.

And so I wanna encourage you just to be remembering Big Al because not everybody that might not look the way we think they should.

Sometimes you're missing out on really great friends.

So Big Al kind of was the star of the show, right.

How did he get so many friends?

He thought about them first, he put them first.

He wasn't worried about the net and him.

He just saw that they were all caught and he jumped right in to save him.

That is pretty amazing.

Let's take a look at our reading power chart, because we're gonna talk about some of those catch of the day words.

So these are called story elements.

It's kind of like a recipe, the ingredients that you need to make a story.

And so when we're writing our own stories, these are some of the things we need to think about too.

So for our setting.

The setting is, where did the story take place?

Do you remember?

Where was the story "Big Al"?

Were they at a grocery store?

Were they at the park?

No, they were in the big blue sea.

Yeah, in the big blue sea.

That's where it happened in the ocean, right.

And what was the problem?

Was there a problem in the story?

There was a problem, right.

Al had no friends.

Al had no friends.

Because they were all afraid of him because of how he looked, right.

In nature big fish usually eat little fish.

So you can imagine the little fish were not that excited to be hanging around with a big fish, but they didn't give him a chance to see how nice he was, right.

Okay, solution.

How did the person...

The problem was he had no friends.

How did he solve that problem, what happened?

Right, he saved the little fish.

He saved the little fish.

And that made it so that they knew he was a good guy, right.

And then in the conclusion of our story, how did the story end?

Big Al, he had the most friends.

Oh, I love a happy ending, don't you?

So at the beginning of the story, he was all alone, he had no friends.

He tried a lot of things to find friends, right.

To make friends.

He just couldn't do it, they didn't trust that he was going to be a kind and helpful friend, and that just made it really hard for him.

He felt sad and lonely.

I hope that if you see somebody that looks like they need a friend that you are brave and are kind and are friendly and using your great, big, friendly smile.

Especially when we start school in the fall, and there might be new people that we don't know, that's a great time to be a friendly friend.

You know, to have friends, you have to be a friend.

And that's what Big Al showed us, right.

He was a friend by helping them and that made it so that they wanted to be friends with him.

I hope that you remember the story.

Now I want you to think about these as your writing stories.

Where's your story gonna take place?

You wanna think about a place.

Sometimes the setting changes, it doesn't always stay in one place.

But in this story it did.

What is the problem that needs to be solved in your story?

How are they gonna solve that problem?

And then how does it end?

Those are the elements to making a story that everyone will want to read.

Okay.

Great.

So before we go to the activity table, I have another joke.

Are you ready for my next joke?

Okay.

Come up here so you can hear it.

Why did the fish blush?

Oh, this is such a good one.

Okay, why did the fish blush?

Blush is when your cheeks get kind of pink 'cause you're embarrassed.

Why did the fish blush?

Because it saw the oceans bottom.

(laughs cheerfully) Get it.

(laughs happily) It saw the bottom of the ocean.

(laughs happily) Oh that was a good one.

Don't hide your face, that was a funny one.

Let's head over to the table, shall we?

All right, today we are going to do a fun activity called story string with pictures.

And I think this is something you can do with other stories that you'll enjoy.

All right, hop up there, sir.

All right.

So today I have this paper and it says story string, and it's kind of like what we did on our reading power chart.

So it's a thread or a string through the story.

And one of my favorite things to do is just to draw and color and it's kind of relaxing.

And what I love about this is that it gives you a chance to rethink or reflect and think about the story.

And so when we look at this, it says characters, all right.

So I wanna think about the story of Big Al and who were the characters in that story?

Do you remember?

Right, for sure, Big Al was one.

So I'm gonna draw kind of a big kinda bobby looking fish.

And I'm gonna color it later, but I've got my big fish.

All right, so then I'm gonna think about who else... Was he the only character in the story?

No, right, there were other characters.

Now there were small fish.

Now sometimes like to draw with a pencil and then I can go back over it and trace it, that way if I make a mistake, I can erase it.

But remember, there's really no mistakes in art.

It's just maybe it didn't turn out exactly how you originally planned.

That's okay.

All right, so I'm gonna draw some little fish here and I'll hold it up for you.

My little fish are very simple, right.

And then I'm gonna make them colorful because in the story they were colorful, right.

So I'm gonna put some colorful fish in my ocean.

And speaking of the ocean, where is the setting of the story?

Right, it's in the deep blue ocean.

So there's a couple things you could do here.

You could just color that or I'm gonna make some waves just to help me remember that it was in the ocean.

And now I might also take some color crayon and then just color over that.

Another idea is you could draw it and then use some watercolor paints and... Oh, that would be really beautiful.

So you could do that too, that's idea.

All right, the next part on my string says, what is the problem?

So we said, when we look at our story chart, the problem was that Al had no friends.

So how would I draw a picture of no friends?

Right, I could draw that no symbol.

So I'm gonna draw that.

I know you've seen this before.

It's kinda like a circle, like this, like no.

And then I might color it in and make it really dark so that it really stands out because he had no friends.

And then I might over here next to it, draw some more little fish so that I can see that he had no friends.

Then I could draw a picture of the solution.

Maybe I wanna draw a picture of that big net with all the little fish inside of it, and Big Al like biting onto the net, I could draw that picture.

So as I go back through my mind, and I think about the story, do you see how reflecting on the story helps me to understand it better and it helps me to really put all the pieces together.

And that's what good readers do.

So this activity might be something fun you wanna try with any story that you read.

Maybe you have a different story at home, and you wanna make pictures to go with each of those things.

That would be a great idea.

And then you could use the pictures to retell your story to the people at your house.

All right.

Well, have you been a good friend?

I want you to think about how you can be a good friend and celebrate friendship, just like Al.

Okay.

All right.

♪ Skinnamarinky dinky dink ♪ ♪ Skinnamarinky do ♪ ♪ I love you ♪ ♪ Skinnamarinky dinky dink ♪ ♪ Skinnamarinky do ♪ ♪ I love you ♪ ♪ I love you in the morning ♪ ♪ And in the afternoon ♪ ♪ I love you in the evening ♪ ♪ And underneath the moon ♪ Come back tomorrow because I have another great story and I'll see you then.

Bye-bye.

(bright music)