Book of the Month

Shared Book: Grumpy Rhino

“Rhino was grouchy and grumpy all the time. How rude!

Will Rhino ever snap out of his grumpy mood?”

Shared reading is a collaborative reading experience that allows all students to participate in reading grade-level texts with fluency and confidence.

This unique approach engages even the most reluctant readers in lively, fast-paced lessons that build the reservoir of language and skills that are essential for reading and writing success.

Grumpy Rhino also offers authentic, embedded support for social-emotional learning with a storyline that helps children recognize and build the key competencies of teamwork, sharing, gratitude, managing emotions, and recognizing social supports.

A five-day lesson plan and teaching panels built into every book help teachers take advantage of every opportunity to support comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, phonemic awareness, phonics skills, and social-emotional learning by focusing on a different literacy strand each day.

Grumpy Rhino is part of the Grade 1 Whole-Class Resources kit but can be enjoyed by children and teachers of all ages!

Related Resources (login required)

Last Month's Book (login required)

Check back next month for a brand-new JillE Literacy book to share with your students!

DAY 1	Read the text aloud and use authentic, text-based discussion to support comprehension, oral language, and social-emotional learning. Sample prompts: Who were the characters? What can you tell me about them? What was a problem? Was the problem solved? How? Why was Rhino grouchy and grumpy? Have you ever felt grumpy like Rhino? What made you feel grumpy? Have there been times when you didn’t want to share something? What was it? What did you do?
DAY 2	Reread the text and work with engaging and challenging vocabulary from the text. For example: Focus on the words grouchy and grumpy. Select students to demonstrate the meanings with actions. Discuss other words that could have been used instead. Other focus words, phrases, and idioms in the book include thumped, charged, how rude, snap out of, grumpy mood, smack, whack, roared, cool it, squeaked, gnawed.
DAY 3	Reread the text with students, pointing out clues that can help them read with fluency. Sample prompts: Make a circle around the quotation marks. Ask: What are these? What do they tell you to do? (Change your voice because someone is talking.) Who is talking here? Make a circle around the words NO WAY! Ask: What do you notice about these words? (capitalized, bold type, exclamation point) Discuss how the students should read these words. Tell students: Read the page, using the clues to help you read with expression.
DAY 4	Reread the story together and reinforce phonemic awareness and phonics skills in the context of reading. Sample prompts: Make a circle around the blend tr in tree. Ask: What sound does this blend make? What other words do you know that start with this blend? Repeat the activity with the digraph ch in charged. Make a circle around the ck at the end of stuck, smack, and whack. Ask: Together, what sound do these two letters make? Write horn on the board. Change the h to b. Ask: What word have I written now? Repeat with *th, t, w.* Circle the rhyming words tree and see. Ask: What other words rhyme with these words?
DAY 5	Reread the story together and give every student an opportunity to practice oral, written, and visual language by responding to the text. Sample prompts: Put the students into groups. Ask them to retell the story using either drama or Creative Clusters. (The last page of every Shared Book includes visuals from the book to help students retell the important events from the story in sequence.) Ask the students to draw and write about Grumpy Rhino. As an alternative, they can draw and write about a time when they were grumpy. Publish the students’ work by collating the pages into another book for shared reading, or make a wall display. (A sample student response is included on the inside front cover of every book.)