The children in her classroom had been studying Eric Carle for a while, focusing primarily on the Bear books: Brown Bear, Polar Bear, Panda Bear, and Baby Bear. There was evidence of their ongoing exploration in the classroom. Below you can see a chart where the children voted for their favorite bear.

Here you can see another way that the children voted, this time between 2 books.

The teacher used two proven methods for voting both with visual clues that helped the children see which books were favored.  In the first example, the children wrote their names above the books, so it created a graph-like visual, and in the second, they put their name cards in slots below the titles which could easily be counted.

So not only was the exploration filled with mathematics, but the children also discovered the same author wrote versions of this story that could be compared and contrasted.  In Brown Bear – the bear sees.  In Polar Bear the bear hears.  It is the same but different.

My student took it all a step further and created a matching game with images from the story.  She started with images which were exactly the same,and then used images that were the same but different.  She found real images of a frog, and a red bird, a duck and a sheep.  These small changes presented some very interesting challenges for the children because they could identify the images for what they, were but found it very difficult to see that they were the same as the drawn pictures.  Watch the video below to see how the girl passes over the match a couple of times and needs the support of her teacher to find the matching green frog.

One of my favorite ways to use children’s books as a vehicle for curriculum development is by examining versions of the same story.  One that jumps to mind is the story of The Gingerbread Boy.  There are so many good versions of this tale; The Gingerbread Man, The Gingerbread Girl, The Gingerbread Friends and the not-so-famous Gingerbread Pirates.

Reading the classic version acquaints the children with the characters and the story line, so they become familiar with the traditional version.  After reading it a few times; enough that they know the characters, and can predict what will happen, you can then introduce a new version.  Tell the children how the story is the same in some ways and different in others.  Ask them to think about what is the same and what is different so they can compare the stories.

There are all sorts of ways to support the children as they make comparisons.  Be sure to use visual representations to organize the children’s ideas.  Using a scanner to make copies of the main characters of each book so the children can see which ones are the same and which ones are different.  You know I like graphic organizers like Venn diagrams or Attribute Maps, so use those to help support the children’s ideas.  Many of the stories have some of the same characters and some different characters.  These distinctions are easily observed by children but some of the nuanced differences may be harder to recognize.  Help the children find them.

This website has more great ideas to explore Gingerbread Man versions.