Today we talked more about the differences between the day and night. We read the book “Can’t You Sleep Little Bear” and made easy read mini books called “Who is Sleeping?”
We watched a day and night educational video on youtube. Then we played some related games that show what happens when day turns into night and night turns into day. Finally students illustrated what they learned by coloring half of a house during the day, and half of a house during the night.
Our Title 1 team put on a pajama party and invited parents to come and read to our class. This also helped launch our class into our day & night science unit. We started out by enjoying cereal for snack and then for drop everything and read, students got to snuggle with their pillows and stuffed animals.
Finally our class built blanket forts, listened to a bedtime story on the SMART board and had our parents read to us at the forts.
Then starting this week we learned about what causes day & night. We read a non-fiction book about what makes day and night and watched a video on youtube about how the earth rotates and revolves around the sun.
As a class, we created a venn diagram that show things you can see in the sky during the day and during the night. Then the class filled out their own venn diagram in a cut and paste activity. At the science center students got to explore the concepts of day and night using a globe.
We did not have school in Martin Luther King Jr day, so we spent the rest of the week celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. We started by watching a Reading Rainbow reading of a picture book about Martin Luther King Jr. Then we created an anchor chart and wrote about what our dream is. (“My dream is that everybody would get along.” “My dream is that people all would be nice.” “My dream is my brother would be nice to me”)
Finally we watched a Martin Luther King Jr. video on Brain Pop Jr, and played a sequencing game where we put parts of MLK’s life back into the correct order.
Last week had our unit on cold weather animals or winter animals. We read an interactive story called “Penguin, Penguin” and labeled main ideas and details on a thinking map. Finally students made penguin glyphs based on their preferences about winter.
We also read nonfiction books about winter animals and got into partner groups and practiced reading easy reader books about winter animals. Finally we practiced following directions and made TLC art walrus.
For our last day in our mini unit on The Mitten we discussed the characters of the mitten and made a bar graph on our favorite animal from the story. Then we made mitten mini booklets on our favorite animal.
We continued on our mini unit on the book The Mitten. We made a text to self connection by writing about a time when we lost something. Then we painted mittens with water color and sprinkled them with salt. After the paint dried we brushed off the salt and it made the mittens look like they had snowflakes on them.
Last week we had our mini unit on The Mitten by Jan Brett, and we began with reading it whole group. Then we created an anchor chart and discussed the elements of the story.
Next we completed a mitten sequence cut and paste activity; illustrating the order that the animals entered in the mitten. Finally students retold the story by acting out the story using masks printed out from Jan Brett’s website.
