Last week was Thanksgiving and we did many activities related to the holiday. We read the story I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie and used pictures from Texas Kindergarten Teacher to retell the sequence of the story in our bellies.
For partner reading, students read the emergent reader book Thanksgiving and then completed the sentence at the end of the book writing something about Thanksgiving that they liked.
We continued to learn about food groups and the importance of having a well balanced meal. We watched Sid the Science Kid’s video on food groups where the students sorted their lunch into different food groups.
After we watched the video we made our own lunch boxes and picked out a “balanced meal” that contain all five food groups. Students pick 3-4 items and put them into a cut out lunchbox.
On Friday we read The Very First Thanksgiving Day. We wrote about the different vegetables, fruits, and meats we would put in our cornucopia and trace and cut our own foods.
As we continue to learn about food groups and nutrition we focused on each food group in depth. Students drew and colored foods that belonged in each group (from https://www.choosemyplate.gov/) while learning the benefits of each food group using our “My Food Groups” book. Since the book is geared more towards first grade, we only did certain pages.
We also started transitioning into our Thanksgiving theme by reading the book; The Very First Thanksgiving Day. Then we made our own Thanksgiving Cornucopia tracing and cutting different, fruits, vegetables, and meat.
This week are learning about nutrition, healthy foods, and food groups. On Monday we read the emergent reader book called Let’s Eat. In this book the author talks about the food she likes to eat, most of them healthy. In the end the author says she likes to eat chocolate but not a lot. We made a list of healthy foods as a class and then made our own class book called Let’s Eat.
For science we learned about the five food groups and watched a nutrition video for kids about having a well rounded diet. Then students made lunchboxes and filled those lunch boxes with various foods from all five groups.
We finished up with our nutrition unit last week. We read an online reading of the book “Jack and the Hungry Giant” on YouTube. Afterwards, as an extension activity, students illustrated the foods that Jack and the giant picked for their meal.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0p5Oh6Gkfc]
Finally students got to create healthy plates with foods that they would like. They had to pick foods from every food group.
First we read the story “There Was And Old Lady Who Swallowed a Turkey”, talked about the different thanksgiving food she ate and what food group they belonged to. Then we created models of ourselves, with pictures of the things the old lady swallowed glued to our “stomachs”, in the correct sequence order.
This last week we began our study on Nutrition. First we read “Gregory the Terrible Eater” and “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and then we talked about foods that were healthy and not healthy foods, and sorted them according to those categories.
Then we use the food cards to create a class food pyramids and sorted them into their food groups. Then students drew their own foods and created their own food pyramids.
This week in our reading program we’ve been learning about plants, and the letter f.
So to celebrate we learned about the parts of a flower, even though we usually talk about this during spring time. We started off watching a few videos on plants growing and we sang the song “Flower, Stem, Leaves, and Roots” a song sung to the tune of “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes”.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d26AhcKeEbE][youtube http://youtu.be/sXrnHff2Kjc]
Then we did a cut and paste activity by labeling parts of a flower and decorating our flower.
Then as Thanksgiving draws closer, for math, we read the story Countdown to Thanksgiving and practiced our number recognition as we read the book. To celebrate the letter F we talked about our favorite thanksgiving foods and made a graph about what food group the food belongs to.
As Thanksgiving approaches we’ve been learning about food, food groups, and nutrition. Our district’s itinerant art teacher came to visit our little village of Shaktoolik. She talked about what kind of food we can find outside with our own hands when the store in the village is closed.
We talked about how we can hunt moose, go fishing, and shoot geese. Students all learned that moose, fish, and geese, are all in the meat food groups. Many students also answered they can pick berries and learned that berries are in the fruits food group. Then we started making hand mobiles that showed a few things we can get from the “store outside the door”.
Students started by tracing their hand on a special soft metal and making designs on the hand, and then filling them in with a special ink that filled only into the cracks of the metal, and then we cut out the hand designs.
Then students drew two items that they could get with their own hands instead of buying it in the store. We picked berries and salmon fish. Children drew the designs in ink and then colored the images with special oil crayons that turned into paint when added with water. She finished her visit with singing a rendition of our favorite Raffi song “Apples and Bananas” and playing on her banjo!
Then as a class at the end of the week we’ve been working on food pyramid plates. Students have been finding pictures of food and adding them to the correct spots on the food pyramid.
To celebrate the letter P, and to start off our food and nutrition theme; we read our new poem called Pancakes. Students practiced reading the poem by using their finger for tracking. Throughout the week well continue to learn the poem and practice our fluency. Then as a class we looked for rhyming words in the poem and created our own stack of pancakes.
