If You Give a Pig a Pancake

Laura Numeroff

Book Description:

Once a pig is given a pancake, he will keep asking for more and more.

Academic Objectives:

ELA2R4 The student uses a variety of strategies to gain meaning from grade-level text. The student

k. Identifies and infers cause-and-effect relationships.

Brilliant Star Objective:

Cognitive/Thinking:Causation: Students will be able to discover or create a relationship between interdependent sequential events showing how one event influences or determines a second event.

Readability Level: 2.5

Vocabulary: remind, envelopes, homesick,

Introduction:

  • Begin a discussion with the students of logical effects of different actions. Tell the students that most of the time you can predict what will happen next by thinking through what makes sense.
  • Give the students a few examples and have them tell you what the logical thing that would happen next is. For example, what would happen if a dog is running towards a big mud puddle?
  • Tell the students that today you will be reading them a story about the series of things that might happen if you give a pig a pancake. The students are to try to determine after each new event or request what they think will happen next.
  • Have a chart paper or cause and effect graphic organizer prepared and ready to fill in while reading the story.

During Reading:

  • Read the story to the students. Pause after every new event to write it down as a cause and invite the students to predict what they think will happen next.
  • Make sure to encourage logical effects and have the students explain their thinking as to why that would be a logical effect to the action.

Follow-Up Activities:

  1. Prepare a sequence of logical events similar to If you give a pig a pancake.
  2. Cut each event on a separate slip of paper and place the complete set in an envelope or plastic bag. Students will need to take their slips of paper and organize them in a logical sequence on construction paper or graphic organizer.
  3. The students should be able to verbally defend their choices for the sequence they put the events in. Make sure that their arguments are logical.
  4. Begin the students with a prompt similar to If you give a pig a pancake and have them come up with 5 sequential events that could come from it.

Return to:

  • Brilliant Star Main Page
  • Brilliant Star Reading Project: | Index | Compilation