To finish of the week of our fall unit, we read the story Autumn’s First Leaf by Steve Metzger and discussed the problem and solution of the story. We then talked about if we were the character Pointy, what fall color we would have liked to have been.
Later that day, we went on a fall leaf hunt. Students tried to collect all five of the fall colors. We took the leaves back into the classroom and sorted them by color and made a graph of our favorite leaf color.
Today as we continue our fall science unit we read the book Pumpkin Pumpkin by Jeanne Titherington. Pumpkin Pumpkin is a book that follows a boy that found some pumpkin seeds that planted them and watched the pumpkin grow. Students learned different pumpkin science vocabulary and the life cycle of a pumpkin. Finally students retold the sequence of the story by putting in order the life of a pumpkin seed in a A-Z Teacher Stuff craft.
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.
We read the story An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly and retold the story by shoving animals into an old lady puppet’s mouth. Then we discussed characters of the story and talked about what a main character is. We drew illustrations or wrote the main character as well as three other characters in inside the story to make a character map.
As we continue to learn about fall and about harvest we read Possum’s Harvest Moon by Anne Hunter. We then created a circle map about fall and talked about where we learned it from? We also then wrote about things we can see in the fall.
In the afternoon we took a berry picking trip to celebrate the way we harvest in Shaktoolik, ate cranberry muffins made from berries I picked previously. We really enjoyed experiencing picking berries, seeing fall colors in the bushes on the tundra and tasting the sweet muffins!
Also our teacher aide, Amanda, found mussu (an edible root found out on the tundra). She taught our students how to harvest the mussu and we all had a taste!
Continuing on with our spring unit we have been learning about parts of a plant and their needs. We learned a song, “Flower, Stem, Leaves, and Roots”, followed motions on our bodies pretending we were the plant and read a written copy of it. This was done to differentiate our reading comprehension to our learners that are more musically inclined, and kinesthetic learners .
We then took what we learned from the song and the dance and created a diagram of a plant and labeled it’s parts and the things it needs to grow.
We then took beans and and put them in a little bit of water to see if we could get them to grow. First we will just add a little water and put them in soil later once they’ve started to sprout a little bit.
