This week we began our IB Unit “Who We Are”. This unit looks into how our environment can influence our roles and responsibilities. We started this unit talking about how families are different. We read the story What Makes a Family and created a thinking map identifying the main idea and details of the story.
In the story we learned that families can be all different sizes and with different types of family members. We created an apple tree that illustrated the number of family members that live with us.
We also read another book called When I am Old With You about a boy talking about all the things he likes to do with his grandpa and wants to do with his grandpa as he continues to get older. We talked about how not all families like to do the same thing as other families. Students then drew pictures in their journals what they like to do with their family.
This last week we learned about the importance of our family and our roles and responsibilities within our family. We also learned about how families can be different sizes and do different things.
One of the books we read was “My Wild Sister and Me” and drew a picture that illustrated the things we like to do with members in our family. We compared our activities with the boy and his sister playing dress up and make believe.
For partner reading students read emergent reader books about different members of the family. Then they learned how to take turns reading and reading to their partner.
For math we created a class graph of how many students in the class have brothers, sisters, both brothers and sisters, or no siblings. We talked about we compared which group had the most and which group had the least. Then we created our own family trees with the number of apples that matched how many people were in our immediate family.
Thursday as part of our family unit we read the book My Wild Sister and Me, and we talked about how the boy and his sister liked to dress up and pretend to be animals. Then we discussed about what we like to do with our family and then illustrated pictures about it. I dictated what they said verbally in their stories.
For math we made a class graph that illustrated who had only brothers, only sisters, both brothers and sisters, or no brothers or sisters in their family. We compared the numbers and discussed which category had the most and which category has the least. These activities and more can be found here.
Finally as a treat we had one of our students parents come in to the class to read a book about a special family.
We read the poem Families and looked for sight words and rhyming words.  When we drew a picture of our families on the back of the poem.  Then we made construction paper puppets of one of our family members.
 
We also wrote about why our families are special to us and traced our hands to make “hug writing”.
This week we have been talking about our families and how they are important to us. Â We read the story “I Love It When You Smile” by . Â We made text to self connections by writing about how someone in our family tries to make us feel better when we’re sad.
We then made a family tree that showed how many members of our family lived with us. Â Then students shared with the class a picture of their family and shared about who the members of their family are.
This week we began our unit on families. Â First we read a poem about families on the smart board and decorated them for their poetry journals.
Later on in the day we discussed how families are important and the things that they do together.  Then we read the story “Gone Fishing” which is a story about a boy going fishing with his dad.
Then we made connections with the story and talked about things we like to do with our family. Â Finally we wrote and illustrated those things that we like to do.
