This last week Friday we finished off our Polar Express week with our very special Polar Express day!! At the beginning of this week I decorated the front of our classroom door and on Friday before school I decorated the tables in the room to look like the Polar Express. The class got to also come to school wearing pajamas like the children in the book got to wear.
Students were given golden tickets to the Polar Express as they went off to lunch. When they came back from lunch they gave me their golden tickets and I punched holes in them like the conductor did in the movie. We then reread the book the Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg and discussed the elements of the story and drew the pictures of the things we discussed.
Finally students got to sit in our “train area” like they would sit on the train and watch the movie. Students got to enjoy cookies and hot chocolate while they watched the movie.
We read the story Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and created a story map about the story. Then each student illustrated and wrote about the problem in the story.
We also made our own Rudolph’s with a cut and paste activity. Then we read a non fiction about real reindeer (caribou) and made a venn diagram to compare and contrast Rudolph to real reindeer. This reindeer template comes from First School Activities.
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.
We started our new unit on friends and feelings and to start us off we created a circle map on friends. Students were given the opportunity to illustrate our ideas as we came up with them.
Then we read the story The Little Red Hen and discussed on how the characters were not good friends. We used Popsicle stick puppets to retell the story as a whole group and students created their own Popsicle stick puppets. Then during free choice centers they got to retell the centers with their friends.
The next day we used sequence cards to put the story back in the correct order. Then students worked on cutting and pasting their sequence cards onto construction paper.
Little Red Hen sequence cards and character printouts found here.
As we finish up our unit on friends and familyWe read the book “I Love it When You Smile” by Sam McBratney. We filled out a thinking map writing about elements of a story.
Then students were given their own individual pictures of the problem and solution. We decorated our pictures, matched them to the problem and solution. As we matched them we retold the story through problem and solution.
We then made a connection with the story as we talked about how our mom’s take care of us just like Roo’s mom helped make him feel better when he was grumpy. Then we wrote about our mom’s with our sight words and we made construction paper mom’s.
