LitWits Kits from LitWits Review

We are a book-loving family!  I was so excited to checkout LitWits Kits from LitWits!  They have so many fantastic options to choose from.  We choose to start with the LitWits Kit for Meindert DeJong's The Wheel on the School.

This digital lesson planning resource is ideal for students ages 8-12 but can be easily adapted to fit your needs and the ages of your students.  There are even suggestions to help you do this for both classrooms and homeschools alike.

LitWits

First, what is a LitWits Kit?  It is a web page chock-full of unique activities and downloads, along with teaching points and printable resources for specific literary books.  There's a handy dandy PDF version included for easy peasy printing.  Basically, these kits have done all the legwork for you!  The great thing about these kits is that you can choose the parts that work for you and your kiddos.

Our LitWits Kit on the Ipad and our The Wheel On The School book.

If I'm going to share with you about our kit, you need to be a bit familiar with the story of The Wheel on the School.  Even the kit includes a summary.  The story takes place in the fishing village of Shora in Friesland.  Lina wants to know why storks no longer come to nest there.  Her teacher encourages the whole class to investigate the question as they work to bring storks back.  Before long, the entire community is working together on their project!  It's a great book. 

Our LitWits Kit for The Wheel on the School contains:

• sensory prop suggestions
• creative projects and activity ideas
• takeaway topics
• research and audiovisual links
• great quotes from the book
• printable templates, activity prompts, creative writing handouts, etc.

There are many sections of our kit - welcome, overview, prop ideas, hands-on fun, bookbites, takeaways, handouts, learning links, great quotes and copyright usage.

We absolutely loved all the hands-on, fun suggestions as we experienced this book.  The kids made storks in a salty storm.  They love art so this project was super fun for them.  We used our watercolor crayons and white feathers.  Our kit told us the supplies needed and gave us directions to make this project.  It also provided the stork template for us to use.

 All of our storks...

 E's stork

D's stork

 C's stork

 B's stork

 And A's stork

We played with dominoes just like the children of Shora.  We used smaller dominoes so they fell often and the kids could see the effect of only one.

One of our domino chains...

We also made a stork, candy tin using cut out pictures of Dutch art.  

We even filled out tin with hard candies as a bonus treat.

In the bookbites section, we tasted the story as we sipped on hot chocolate (a few had milk!) and ate donuts, just like the community of Shora did during the storm!

Enjoying the story through food and drink.

LitWits Kits help kids in fun, hands-on, and meaningful ways.  They really give great ideas to help teach great books.  With bookbites ideas you taste what the characters ate.  With creative project ideas you make what the character made.  With kinetic activity ideas you can do what the characters did.  You can even hear and see what the characters' world looked and sounded like with audiovisual links.

We will be diving into our LitWits Kit for Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth next.

I really like the looks of the chromagraph activity and the Norton and Jules project.

We were so blessed to receive LitWits Kits for Meindert DeJong's The Wheel on the School, James B. Garfield's Follow My Leader, Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  I'm really looking forward to using our other kits as the kids and I dive into these rich stories together.  We are familiar with these books so I chose these titles to really make the stories come to life with the kids.  We are going to have a blast!

Check out the short video below to see how these kits are like taking a field trip of the book you are reading!  It even shows you a few examples of activities from the LitWits Kit for My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George.

Be sure to click on the banner below to visit the Homeschool Review Crew blog to read more reviews of LitWits.

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