We spent a bit of time in the morning reviewing some of our rules and expectations in the classroom. After spending a few weeks away from school it never hurts to do a bit of review. We got right to work on our new reading unit. This week we are reading stories about the season winter. We started off with a classic: The Mitten by Jan Brett. Many of the kids in the class had heard the story before and wanted to help participate in the reading. After the story we practiced retelling as a class. Then each student set to work creating their own mitten and animals to use as puppets when telling this story. They should have brought those home already, so ask them to retell the story to you!
On Wednesday we read a different version of The Mitten. This one was written by Jim Aylesworth. As a class we created a double bubble to compare and contrast the two versions of the story. Everyone was really excited to see how the stories had the exact same idea but each author added their own creative touch to make the story their own.
Next we talked a little bit about New Year's resolutions. I was very impressed with how much they know about resoutions. One student told us it was "like making a promise to yourself to do something that year" and another chimed in "yeah, and the promise is to do something to make yourself a better person." I couldn't have said it better myself. We did some brainstorming about things we could resolve to do this year and then everyone wrote their own resolution. We finished off this lesson by creating these super cute party people!
On Thursday we did a visualizing activity using the book Owl Moon. I read the story aloud without showing the pictures, and as I read each student used a piece of blank paper to draw what they saw in their head. After reading, we looked at the pictures in the book to see how the illustrator interpreted the story, then we looked at some of our artwork to see how it was alike and different. We realized that while everyone had a lot of the same ideas, no two pictures were exactly the same.
For writing, we made a flip book for the new year. Under each flap students had to write finish each of the following statements:
- Last year I learned....
- This year I want to learn ....
- My favorite part of last year was ...
- This year I hope to ...
This one made my heart smile! "This year I hope to... stay with my teacher". So sweet! :)
Yesterday we finished off the unit reading Snowmen at Night. We made connections to the story by writing about what we would do if we were snowmen at night. After they completed the writing portion of this project, we made these cute snowmen using tiny pieces of cut paper. I love how they turned out!
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