Rainbow Week

Last week we finished off our color unit with rainbow week. We read a variety of fiction stories involving rainbow colors.

Our reading focus last week was on recognizing features that define fiction books. We made a circle map describing what we already know about the fiction genre, and during the week we dug deeper into the story elements of fiction books.

I found a great story elements poster here, and made one for my classroom at the teacher center over the summer. I love the simplicity of the poster and how easy it is to use over and over with different books. With each book we read last week, we used sticky notes to describe the different elements of the story. Here is an example from the book Purple, Green, and Yellow by Robert Munsch:

Since our school is a Thinking Maps campus, we discovered how we could put this same information into a tree map format to make it easy to read. After reading the book A Color of His Own, we worked on creating a tree map together and students had to fill in the story elements from the book and illustrate each one. The finished products turned out great!

Now that we have Daily 5 up and running each day, we will be doing a lot less of the crafty activities we did the first few weeks of school. Our learning is less project based and rather is built into the daily 5 activities. Because of this, I try to choose one of those fun activities a week and save it for Friday. I call it "Fun Friday" because this is the day we break from our usual schedule and do fun, project based, activities that tie into the weekly learning. This Friday we read My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss. In the story, the character talks about the way each color makes him feel. We discussed feeling words and the kids came up with a great list of feelings. Then, they each created a portrait with rainbow colored hair, and on each piece of hair they had to choose what feeling word that color makes them think of. They turned out super cute!

This week we will be continuing our fiction unit and starting up a two week theme of monsters. It's always a fun creative unit so check back to see some of the fun we'll be having!