As we continue with our First Thanksgiving Unit in Social Studies, we went back to Scholastic’s First Thanksgiving and took a virtual tour of a Pilgrim village and a Wampanoag homesite. There we learned about the daily life of both groups of people and created venn diagrams to compare and contrast the life of the Wampanoag’s and the Pilgrims.
As a class we read “A Plump and Perky Turkey” and cut out turkey puzzles and glued them in the correct order. In Kindergarten we recently learned about positional words and shapes. Students created their puzzles during math workshop.
We read the book “Thanksgiving Day” reviewed the most important details from the book such as the different things the children were thankful for in the story. Then students created their own turkeys with feathers where they write what they are thankful for.
We read the story The Great Turkey Race and created our own subtraction story problems to connect it to the story we just read. Students cut out how many turkeys started out on the farm. They crossed how many turkeys ran away and wrote how many turkeys were left.
We have started the First Thanksgiving Unit in our K-1. To start out the unit we read the book “The First Thanksgiving” and I discussed with the students an overview of Native Americans and Pilgrims. They learned that the Pilgrims arrived to America by the boat the Mayflower.
We took what few things we learned about the Mayflower in the book and started a KWL. We thought up of questions we wanted to know about the Mayflower. Then we took a virtual tour of the Mayflower from Scholastic’s First Thanksgiving website.
Then we took the questions answered and what we learned to write giant postcards. The students pretended that they were pilgrims that traveled on the Mayflower. The students describe how they slept, eat, things they did for fun, or even how they went to the bathroom on the ship.
In science we’ve been studying nutrition and food groups. We read “Fruit”, “Bananas Sometimes”, and “We Set the Table” in our leveled reading groups. Then as art activity we decided to create a healthy plate of food full of the five food groups. Students colored pictures of food and pasted them to their correct food groups. Students only looked for healthy food to put on their plate.
As a class we read the story “If You Give a Pig a Pancake”. While reading we made predictions about what will happen next in the story by using our prior knowledge to guess what he would want next after he was given something.
Then after we read the stories we made our own pigs and drew what we would want to give our pigs. Then we drew what the pig might want after we gave him the first thing.
In the afternoon we have both reading workshop and math workshop. This is where our students work in multi-leveled groups on specific skills that have been previously taught or we’re just learning. Currently in Kindergarten we’re working on patterns and numbers 0-100. In 1st grade we’ve been learning about addition facts up to 12 and anchors of 10 in addition.
To celebrate our first snow in Shaktoolik we read the book called Snowballs and learned about different types of snow people you can make. We then got together as a class an and discussed what are the steps to making a snowman. Kindergarten and 1st grade wrote their own directions as 1st grade continues to learn about Expository Writing. Student’s also got to paint their snowman after they were done writing their directions.
It’s been very busy for our K-1 All-Stars. We’ve been working on long vowels in 1st Grade and short vowels in Kindergarten. In Math 1st graders have been working on numbers that add up to 10 and doubles. Kindergarten has been working on patterns and ordinal numbers.
With everything we’ve been covering it was nice to have a day of fun on Halloween! Our All-Stars were very excited and got to enjoy many activities and snacks throughout the afternoon. We started out with our costume party and contest. Students who brought their Halloween costumes were able to put them on and display them to the rest of the class. So that the other students weren’t left out, the student’s that forgot to bring their costumes got to be judges. Everyone got prizes and we had categories for different costumes. We had the scariest costume(s), prettiest costume(s), most creative costume(s), the best overall costume(s), and the most colorful costume(s).
After students got to enjoy their costumes came time to carve pumpkins! Luckily a parent brought an extra pumpkin in to carve so we got to split up the class into two groups. With my help and parents help, they got to help carve the design and scoop out the “guts”!
After the pumpkin carving student’s washed their hands and enjoyed snacks and Halloween craft centers! There were three stations. One station a group got to make Halloween puppets, another station a group got to make paper plate masks, and the the third station was lollipop ghosts.
To finish out the party we had took our whole class for a Halloween parade to show off their costumes, their masks, or their Halloween puppets to the rest of the school.
