Read and Circle: Find the Zoo Animal the Sentence Names

One pencil action only on this 1st grade read-and-do page, the read-and-circle face: draw a circle. A row of eight zoo animals sits at the top — an antelope, a cheetah, an elephant, a second antelope, a giraffe, a fox, a panda and a third antelope — and the six sentences below it all begin the same way: Circle the giraffe. Circle all the antelopes. Circle the panda. Circle the cheetah. Circle the fox. Circle the elephant. Each sentence ends in a little dashed box the child checks when the circle is drawn. Because the verb never changes, the whole reading load falls on the noun, and on the difference between the giraffe and all the antelopes.

This is the gentlest face in the read-and-do family, meant for a child who is just moving from reading words to reading for a purpose. The noun is the only thing to find, and it is found in a picture the child can already name, so the page rewards matching the printed word to the spoken animal name. The single sentence with all in it is the one that matters: a child who circles one antelope has read the noun but not the sentence, and the teacher points to the word all and asks how many there are. Zoo animals keep the nouns long and distinct — cheetah, elephant, panda — so sound-it-out reading has real work to do.

Print it as a first independent reading task and expect it to take five minutes. When the child circles reliably, move to the base read-and-do page, which mixes circle with underline, cross out, check mark and write, and then to the two-step page. The true-or-false page uses the same kind of picture strip but asks the child to judge a statement instead of act on it.