Horses, by Seymour Simon, is on the Common Core Standard Exemplar list for the 4/5 reading band.  Simon is a master at presenting nonfiction information for youngsters in an engaging, interesting manner.  The photographs are so appropriate for the text.  There are no run-of-the-mill photographs; all are extraordinary.  In Horses, Simon begins with the history of the horse and how they are used throughout history.

Because Simon does such a thorough job of describing the characteristics of horses, I decided to compose a lesson focusing on comparing and contrasting, a common core standard for fourth and fifth grades.  I made a 3-column chart for the activity.  The left column is for information only about horses, the right column for human information, and the middle column for the commonalities.

simon explained where the phrase "from the horse's mouth" came from.  My second activity for this text deals with idioms.  After discussing a couple of other idioms, I will have the students work with some on another handout I made.  I typed some common idioms, followed by lines for students to explain what they think the actual meaning of the idiom is.  I also placed a box below their writing so they can illustrate the literal meaning of the words.  For example, if the teacher states "I want all eyes on the board," the students would write something like "the teacher wants everyone to look at the board."  In the box, the students would draw a picture of a teacher and a blackboard with many pairs of eyes on it.

I also came up with some discussion questions to use with the students.  Simon discusses how people used to describe things as needing two horses or four horses to pull them.  Today we still refer to the ability of engines to pull vehicles as horsepower.  Why do we still talk about horsepower when horses don't pull our cars, trains, or planes?  Horses don't exactly pull airplanes across the sky and never have.  Can you think of anything else we still refer to by a name that no longer makes sense literally?  Also, Simon tells us about feral horses.  Is it right that humans capture and keep horses?  Are there still places in our country where wild horses roam freely?  If so, where are they?

Another assignment I thought about is to have students make a timeline about the history of the horse using the information from the text.  Also, Seymour Simon has a great web site at http://www.seymoursimon.com/.  You can access all or most of his books there.  I typed "Horses" in the search box.  There are teacher lesson plans available to download.  Included in the lesson plan is a series of 6 pictures illustrating events in history relating to horses.  Students are to use the text to determine their proper order.