Rainforest

In preparation of our upcoming field trip to the Dallas World Aquarium, we did a research unit on some of the Rainforest animals we will see there. We read non-fiction books, listened to Pebble Go, and used circle maps and tree maps to record information we learned. Then, we used our thinking maps to write about the animals. The students also created some kind of art representation of the animal. We completed shared writing about jaguars and sloths.

 

Customize a scrapbooking design

Groundhog Day 2012

We read Substitute Groundhog by Pat Miller. We each created an advertisement to tell the qualities needed to do the groundhog's job.

We also created our own groundhogs, read a non-fiction book, and created a tree map about groundhogs. Then we wrote one fact we learned about groundhogs.

We also watched a Discovery Streaming Video about the Holiday and created a graph to show if we thought the groundhog would see his shadow and we would have six more week of winter or if we thought the groundhog would not see his shadow and spring would come early. 10 of us thought we would have more winter and 11 of us thought spring would come early. Today we found out that our prediction was right! Yeah for an early Spring!

 

Rudolph

We read Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer and created a story map. The kids each illustrated one part of the story map. To review last weeks lesson on entertainment books and inform books, we read a non-fiction book about Caribou and created a Venn Diagram to compare Rudolph to real Caribou.
Take a look at these cute reindeer we made.

 

Entertain/Inform

We are learning about purposes of reading and how to tell the difference between a book that is for entertainment and a book for that is to inform. First, we looked at some books for entertainment and discussed qualities such as talking animals, fun stories and pictures that were drawn. Then, we looked at some books to inform and discussed qualities such as photographs, table of contents or glossary and gives us information. Then we sorted the books by entertain or inform. Finally, we compared a the Three Bears ( entertain) to real bears ( inform). We created a Venn diagram to compare the characters in a entertain book to the characters in a inform book.

 

Letter L

In honor of letter l, we read Leo the Late Bloomer for fun and then we read a non fiction book about lions. Then, we made a TLC lion and created sentences to tell a fact we learned about lions.

 

Reindeer Venn

We read Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer and a non-fiction book about Caribou. We compared the fictional reindeer to the real reindeer and created a Venn diagram. The students also make the reindeer from www.makinglearningfun.com directional art activities.

Fiction/Nonfiction

We read many books last week about community helpers. On Friday we sorted the books by fiction and non-fiction.

Clifford's First Valentine

This idea came from my former teammate April Larremore. Check out her blog Chalk Talk on my blog list.

We read Clifford's First Valentine and discussed things that Clifford did in the story and things a a real dog can do. We have been learning how to tell the difference between real (non-fiction) and make believe (fictional) characters and books. The students created a Clifford out of hearts and then we created a chart of things Clifford did and things that a real dog can do.