SUBWAY RIDE

By Heather Lynn Miller
Publisher Charlesbridge
ISBN: 978-1-58089-111-0

FROM THE FLAP:
Pay the fare.
Turn the gate—
Take a subway ride.

People rush.
Music blares.
Doors slide shut.
The train roars down the track.

A wondrous trip through the world’s subway stations brings five children together, showing how travel through different cultures creates community.

KATE’S TAKE: Celebrate transportation and multiculturalism with Heather Lynn Miller’s Subway Ride.

MOVE AND GROOVE (Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal)

Take your class outside or to the gym. Form a train. Have the engine pick a movement such as skipping, hopping, or galloping and ask the rest of the class to follow him. Keep changing leaders until everyone has had a chance to be the engine. Play train music in the background such as Dan Zanes’s “Catch That Train.”

RHYME AND MATCH (Verbal/Linguistic and Interpersonal)

Draw two train cars on an 8 ½ by 11 sheet of paper. Make ten copies. Then, write one word from the story in the top car and its rhyming pair in the other car. Pass out one train car to each child and ask them to pair up with their rhyming partner. Follow up with a worksheet that has the rhyming pairs separated in two columns and ask them to draw a line to the word that rhymes with the word in the other column.

SIGHT WORD SEARCH (Verbal/Linguistic)

Miller’s text repeats these sight words often: we, our, up, and down. Type out the short text and list the four sight words at the top of the page. Ask each student to circle all of those sight words on her page. Then give students another page that has the text without the sight words. Ask them to write in the missing words.

TICKETS FOR SALE (Logical/Mathematical)

Miller’s book takes readers to ten different subway stations throughout the world. Ask ten of your students to be ticket sellers and the other ten pretend to be customers. Both customers and vendors will need pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. Ask each student to go to one vendor to buy a ticket. You can have the tickets be different amounts so that each child is buying or selling a ticket at his or her math level. After the ten students have bought their tickets, ask them to find a train seat on the rug. Extend the math by adding up the cost of the tickets in each row and on the whole train. Then have the sellers become the buyers and visa-versa and repeat.

WE RIDE CLASS BOOK (Verbal/Linguistic, Visual/Spatial, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal)

Celebrate your classroom community with a class book. Give each child an 8 ½ by 11 sheet of white paper with the following sentence on the bottom: We ride past __________ home on __________ _________. Have the children write their name in the first blank and their street name on the second and third blank. If you have a homeless child, he or she could pick a street where they would like to live and draw their dream home. Compile the pages in a 3-ring binder and send home with each student.

BOOK BUDDIES:

-All Aboard! by Mary Lyn Ray
-Freight Train by Donald Crews
-I Love Trains! by Philemon Sturges
-Puzzle Train by Susannah Leigh
-Shortcut by Donald Crews