Apologies for the long time between posting. Things have been busy at home and at school. As we start our first International Baccalaureate unit we are learning about fall-time traditions such as Halloween traditions. We read an informative text called Celebrate Halloween. We discussed how one Halloween tradition was to dress up in costumes. Students wrote stories about their favorite costumes. The sample writing below says “I like the unicorn”.
For math we created a class bar graph to show what kind of costume is our favorite costume. Students put a sticky note above the category of the costume that they will wear during Halloween, or their favorite costume. We discussed the category with the greatest number of students and the category with the least amount of students.
For art we did two projects; Frankenstein paper plates and Frankenstein puzzles.
This week we’ve been learning about holiday traditions and the differences between needs and wants during the holidays. We started off by reading How the Grinch Stole Christmas and discussed how the Grinch learned that Christmas wasn’t about presents. We made construction paper Grinchs and wrote how we would make the Grinch grin.
For social studies the next day, we watched a video on Brain Pop Jr about what a need is, what a want is, and their differences. We sorted pictures into the two categories. For art we made stockings, cut out pictures from magazines, and sorted them into needs and wants on the stockings. You can get a Christmas Needs vs Wants freebie activity here.
Just to catch everyone up on our Thanksgiving unit last week:
We used the Scholastic First Thanksgiving Virtual Field trip to learn about the Wompanoag Native American tribe that made friends with the Pilgrims and helped them survive the winter. We compared the Pilgrims Daily life to the Wompanoags Daily Life. The comparisons included food, houses, clothing, chores, and games. We also created pilgrim hats and turned them into headbands that we wore out to the buses.
During math we’ve been learning about shapes and how to design patterns. We created a native american head and shirt. Then we used real pattern block to practice making our own design for the shirts. Then we used paper pattern blocks that we glued to decorate the Wompanoag’s shirt. Last we counted how many of each pattern block we used and wrote it on the recording sheet. You can find a FREE COPY of this activity here.
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.
Last week we learned about the difference between needs and wants. We watched the lesson on Brain Pop Junior then we made Christmas stockings that displayed needs and wants from pictures on magazines.
We read the book Thanksgiving is for Giving Thanks by Margaret Sutherland. Then we brainstormed things that we were thankful for and wrote about it on a big turkey paper. Then students partner read the emergent book A Funny Bird and students circled the sight words that they’ve learned, then colored the pictures.
