On the last day of our gingerbread unit we read one more gingerbread story and retold the story by putting pictures back in the correct sequence.
We also made gingerbread dough and students helped cut out their own gingerbread people. After they were done baking the students came back from specials surprised to find that their people had run away! After they caught all their gingerbread people, they got to decorate and eat their creation!
As we continued to learn about caribou we also read other fiction stories including Olive The Other Reindeer. We filled out a bubble map that illustrated four ideas of our favorite parts of the story. Then students chose one part of the story that they liked the best and wrote about it. You can get the writing activity here.
One student wrote “she was riding on his sleigh”, and another student wrote “My favorite part of the story was when she got on the bus.”
At the end of our unit students partner read a Rudolph emergent reader that talked about things that Rudolph saw. Students colored the pictures based on the color words that were in the books. They also made reindeer headbands. Headbands can be found here and emergent reader books can be found here.
Our Title 1 team put on a pajama party and invited parents to come and read to our class. This also helped launch our class into our day & night science unit. We started out by enjoying cereal for snack and then for drop everything and read, students got to snuggle with their pillows and stuffed animals.
Finally our class built blanket forts, listened to a bedtime story on the SMART board and had our parents read to us at the forts.
Then starting this week we learned about what causes day & night. We read a non-fiction book about what makes day and night and watched a video on youtube about how the earth rotates and revolves around the sun.
As a class, we created a venn diagram that show things you can see in the sky during the day and during the night. Then the class filled out their own venn diagram in a cut and paste activity. At the science center students got to explore the concepts of day and night using a globe.
We did not have school in Martin Luther King Jr day, so we spent the rest of the week celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. We started by watching a Reading Rainbow reading of a picture book about Martin Luther King Jr. Then we created an anchor chart and wrote about what our dream is. (“My dream is that everybody would get along.” “My dream is that people all would be nice.” “My dream is my brother would be nice to me”)
Finally we watched a Martin Luther King Jr. video on Brain Pop Jr, and played a sequencing game where we put parts of MLK’s life back into the correct order.
Last week we finished up a fun unit full of Thanksgiving activities. For our word work we created a flip book with repetitive sight words and things that you do on Thanksgiving.
We also read Thanksgiving books on things that we like. Then students used their knowledge of sight words to write sentences using the word ‘we’.
For math we read the story “The Great Turkey Race” discussed the problem and solution of the story. Then we created our own math story problems using addition and pictures of turkeys for the visual.
Finally we learned about the life of Pilgrims and Wampanoags on Scholastic.com’s First Thanksgiving website. Students made designs on Wampanoags using pattern block cutouts.
First we read the story “There Was And Old Lady Who Swallowed a Turkey”, talked about the different thanksgiving food she ate and what food group they belonged to. Then we created models of ourselves, with pictures of the things the old lady swallowed glued to our “stomachs”, in the correct sequence order.
This week we started fire safety week and we talked about how firefighters help keep us safe in case of a fire. We read the book “Firefighters A-Z” and watched fire at Hooper’s store video from Sesame Street. Afterwards we made a list of things that firefighters need to help keep us safe. Then we wrote about one of the items.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6Z6njK-LGs]We read the story Pumpkin Pumpkin and discussed the life cycle of a pumpkin. Then we created pumpkins with vines on them that show the order of how a pumpkin grows.