Sylvester and the Magic Pebble Freebies

It seems every time I get ready to read a book, hands go up and students are just bursting to tell me that they know the story. This week, I am digging out all of the older Caldecott books I have in my collection. These are some of the greatest stories ever written and I want my littles to enjoy them too. I doubt that they have heard them already!

Today, we were working on making predictions that dig deeper, using clues and our schema to make good ones that go beyond the text read. Predictions are hard to make when you have already heard a story before!

The medal winner from 1970, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, was the perfect story to use! The kids absolutely LOVED it because it was brand new to them!

Story Summary

This book centers around Sylvester, a donkey, who loves to collect pebbles. One day, he comes across a red magical pebble. The pebble grants wishes.

If you know anything about stories where wishes are granted, you know that having your wishes granted goes well at first, but then the wishes tend to take a turn for the worst. In this case, fear causes Sylvester to make a wish in a hurry, instead of thinking before he took action. Those actions had consequences.

This story is perfect for helping students to better understand cause and effect, central message and more!

The Read Aloud

I read just a few pages, and then STOPPED (Oh, the suspense!) and allowed the students to write in their reading response notebooks. 

Tomorrow we will complete another page about the accuracy of  our predictions.

This is such a fantastic read aloud for so many reasons! It has tons of rich vocabulary and lends itself well to working on many reading skills! I have big plans for this book for next year, but we are winding down and just don’t have the time to get into a big unit!

 But we will do some creative writing and summarizing with these pages!

I was thinking what great pages these would be to leave with a sub!

You can download the printables here if you like!

How fun would it be to give each student a magic wishing pebble of their own?

 Maybe next year…

You can find a copy of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble on Amazon. (Creative Lesson cafe receives a small commission on Amazon purchases through the Affiliate program)

Happy magical teaching!