Last week we had our mini unit on The Mitten by Jan Brett, and we began with reading it whole group. Then we created an anchor chart and discussed the elements of the story.
Next we completed a mitten sequence cut and paste activity; illustrating the order that the animals entered in the mitten. Finally students retold the story by acting out the story using masks printed out from Jan Brett’s website.
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.
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.
This week we finish up our unit on weather and seasons. We also continued our study on tall tales and we read a story called Snow Globe Family. One of our reading skills we have been learning is how to visualize parts of the story or make mind movies. So I read part of the story to them without showing them the pictures first. Then we came up with the things we visualized in a class list.
We then created our own snow globes and wrote about what we would do if we lived in a snow globe. We hung up our drawings and writing in the classroom.
Today as we continue our unit on Season & The Weather; we learned a new book genre called a tall tale. During our teacher read aloud portion of the day, we read the story called “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”. It is a story that is written as a tall tale told by a grandpa with a big imagination.
At our writing station during centers today, students wrote their own tall tales about the weather and told which season they would happen in.
In our reading program we’ve been learning about the weather and seasons. As we work towards becoming independent readers we’ve begun to read decodable books that focus on the skills we’ve been learning during our phonics time.
Our book this week focused on different types of weather found in spring called “What Is It?”. Our students first spent time practicing the book during the “read to others” portion of the day, and then got the option to practice independently reading the story.
We then discussed the story and the main character, Lin. Students discussed what type of weather Lin liked, and what weather Lin didn’t like. They used their inferencing skills to use the pictures to help them come to their conclusions. Then students illustrated their findings showing which weather Lin liked and did not like.
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!
