Ask and say: What do you see on the covers? What do you think this story is about? Do you recognize the animals in the illustrations? What do the illustrations tell you about the setting? Can you tell where and when this story might be happening? Share with the group anything else that you can infer from the illustrations.

Build Background
You will want to provide suggestions for eliciting prior knowledge and building background. Provide questions that get to what the child already knows about the topic or situation. Have they had any experience with ponds?

Ask: What is a pond? Where do you find ponds? Have you ever visited a pond yourself? What kinds of things do you see at a pond?

You may have children brainstorm a list of things they have seen or found at a pond. This may also naturally bring up some of the content words children will encounter in the text.

Book Walk
While doing your book walk, go through as much of the book as you feel necessary, pointing out things you feel will challenge children as they are reading. Look at the pictures with children and discuss what animals and plants they see. You may want to write the animals and plants children list on the board or a piece of paper. This step is to help reduce anxiety that some children feel when they are faced with a book that has unfamiliar text.

Pages 3 and 4

Say and ask: This is a book about life in and around a pond. How can we describe the pond in this picture? Does it look like a pond you know?

Pages 5

Say and ask: Let's look at what is happening in this illustration. What are these animals and what are they doing? The ducklings are swimming.

Page 6

Say and ask: This is an interesting photograph of a bird. What kind of bird do you think it is? What is it doing?

Pages 7

Say and ask: This is a very interesting view of the pond. What do you see? How are these animals moving?

Page 8

Say and ask: How do you think these plants grow?

Pages 9

Say and ask: What animals are in this illustration? What do you know about how frogs grow?

Page 10

Say and ask:

What do you think you would hear if you were standing near the pond?

Pages 11

Say and ask: That is an interesting structure. What do you think it is? A beaver dam. How do you think it got there?

Page 12

What do you think the turtles are doing?

Pages 13 and 14

Say and ask: There are many things happening underwater in the pond. What animals live here?

Reading Strategies
Remind children to use any or all of the following strategies to help them in their reading.

• Segmenting the sounds in the word and sounding them out. Model using your fingers or strips of paper to isolate segments to sound out.
• Predicting words based on the illustration, then using the initial letter sound(s) to confirm your prediction.
• Reread any sentence or page that you had difficulty on, to make sure that you understood the text.

Ask children about the strategies they think they will use if they get to a difficult word. You may want to act as a role model to show them how it might look or sound as they are reading. Pretend to read, getting stuck on a word, model a strategy to help yourself decode the word or phrase.