Brr! This is a real frozen castle. Does an ice queen live here? No! It is part of a festival in China. People come every year to see art made of ice. They celebrate the cold weather.
What happens when the weather warms up? Bye-bye, ice castle!
Shutterstock.com
Frozen Castle
From the December 2023/January 2024 Issue
Learning Objective: Students will practice getting information from text about and images of an ice castle.
Lexiles: 370L
Featured Skill:
Key Details,
Vocabulary: festival, celebrate
Topic:
Social Studies,
Common Core Standards
TEKS Standards
About the Article
English Language Arts Focus
Nonfiction text features: photographs & labels
Social Studies Focus
Arts and culture
Vocabulary
festival, celebrate
Step-by-Step Lesson Plan
Implementation
Whole Group
Pairings and Text Connections
- From the Storyworks archive: “Big Read-Aloud: Escape From the Ice,” December 2022/January 2023.
- Suggested books: Winter Wonderland by Jill Esbaum; Ice Boy by David Ezra Stein
Before-Reading Resources
- Video: When Water Freezes (7 minutes) Build background knowledge on how ice forms and its properties.
- Vocabulary Slideshow: (5 minutes) festival, celebrate
Suggested Reading Focus
Information from text and images/Labels (20 minutes)
- Take a close look at the photo of the ice castle. Ask children to share what they notice about it. Say that we get a lot of information from pictures.
- Now remind children that labels point to part of the picture and tell us more about it. Have children find the labels and follow the arrows with their fingers. Read the labels together.
- Read the mini article for more facts about the ice castle.
- Finally, discuss what children learned about the ice castle from both the picture and the words in the article. What can they recall? What was most surprising?
After-Reading Skills Practice
- Skills: Getting information, alphabet order/writing (15 minutes)
Extension Science Activity
Skills: Observation (15 minutes)
- Look at a picture of Elsa’s castle from the movie Frozen and the picture of the ice castle in the article.
- Compare the two castles. What is the same? What is different?
Text-to-Speech