Use Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper to strengthen your students' comprehension skills, build their vocabulary, and help them understand how words work.
Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper is a delightful and heartwarming story about three animal friends—Cat, Squirrel, and Duck—who make pumpkin soup together. Through teamwork and a little bit of tension, the trio learns valuable lessons about friendship, sharing, and the importance of working together. With its charming illustrations and thoughtful storyline, this book is perfect for helping students strengthen their reading comprehension skills and dive into a world of adventure, problem-solving, and creativity.
This word work lesson plan and set of teaching resources use Pumpkin Soup by Helen Cooper as a springboard for instruction focused on consonant digraphs.
By anchoring word study to the text, students will benefit from seeing how the initial, medial, and final consonant digraph /th/ is used inside of the text before engaging in both guided and independent practice with digraphs.
This set of vocabulary development resources for Pumpkin Soup highlights the words that are most important for students to know and understand while reading the book. Through engaging in fun word games, matching words to definitions and pictures, and practicing how to categorize words, students will develop the vocabulary necessary to comprehend this story and many others.
In Pumpkin Soup, Cat, Duck, and Squirrel experience many emotions while making their soup. This activity lets students track those feelings by drawing faces and naming emotions that match what each character felt at different moments. It's a fun way for students to explore how feelings change throughout the story and understand each character's journey.
In Pumpkin Soup, Cat, Duck, and Squirrel discover that teamwork and understanding are the key ingredients for making something delicious. Now, it's your turn! Use this activity to "cook up" a recipe for the story by listing the ingredients (like friendship and cooperation) and steps that led to their success in the kitchen. This activity helps students retell the story in a fun, recipe format!
Read Pumpkin Soup then have some fun matching cause and effect sentences from the book. By using these cause and effect cards, students will demonstrate both their comprehension of the text and their understanding of cause and effect relationships in a hands-on and interactive way.
This resource includes matching/sorting cards and a sorting mat for four cause and effect sentences in Pumpkin Soup. Each cause card is marked with a square and each effect card is marked with a circle, making it easy to support students who struggle with matching cause and effect relationships.
Understanding cause and effect is a key comprehension and language skill. The text structure of Pumpkin Soup includes several examples of cause and effect relationships, making it easy to use as a springboard for modeling or independent practice.
This simple resource includes four sentence stems. Each sentence stem presents an effect. Students will use what they know about the book to fill in the cause of the effect.
