Last week was our reindeer theme! We started by reading Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and Rudolph’s Bright Christmas. We also read a nonfiction story about caribou. As a class we labeled a Venn diagram that showed the similarities and differences between Rudolph and caribou. We also made cut and paste Rudolph’s.
This week we began our unit on gingerbread. In this unit we read many different versions of the gingerbread man folktale. We started by reading a version that resembles original Gingerbread Man story. We did a retell of the story by doing a sequence cut and paste. Then we made our own gingerbread men and write action words to complete a phrase.
The next day we read another version called Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. Students made a list of things that they would run away from if they were the gingerbread baby and wrote about it in their journals. The gingerbread man writing prompt comes from The Education Center.
We compared the characters from the story from Gingerbread Baby to the characters from Gingerbread Man using hula hoops and character cards. Then students made gingerbread houses for the gingerbread baby.
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.
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.
As the first official day of fall is around the corner we start our unit on autumn with the story “When Autumn Comes”. We talked about what we learned about fall by creating a hoola-hoop Venn diagram that compared and contrasted fall and summer. Then the class sorted pictures into winter, spring summer, or fall.
Continuing on with our Winter / The Four Seasons theme, we learned a new song / poem called The First Snow. We learned new winter vocabulary and practiced memorizing the words as we sang along to the song on CD.
Afterwards we cutout a picture of the boy from the song and helped him get dressed to go play outside. We colored and cutout the different winter clothes and discussed the correct sequence the boy would need to put them on.
Finally we wrote directions for others on how to get dressed for winter, and during centers students could create Venn Diagram to compare and contrast winter to summer!
We have continued our theme on farms and animals on the farm. The students that we can get more than just food from farms but we can also get wool from sheep to make clothes. Then for read aloud time we read story Woolbur. We created a Venn Diagram comparing the story to a previous story we read during our National Geographic Cengage Reading block time.
We wrote about what makes us special and unique and made an art project to make us colorful like Woolbur and his friends. Students really enjoyed showing of their own unique creativity!
