Polar Bears in the Arctic

Last week we finished up a unit on penguins who live in the Antarctic, so this week we moved on to polar bears who live in the Arctic.

On Monday we read a nonfiction book about polar bears, and then did a little research about them on Pebblego.com. After reading, each student made a polar bear using construction paper, and wrote three facts they learned on it's body.  We learned a lot of interesting facts! For example, did you know a polar bear can swim up to 60 miles? Or that they build a snow den for the 2 babies they have at a time?

On Tuesday we learned a little bit more about the Arctic environment and the people who live there. We read the book Angela from the Arctic and then had  discussion about how her life is the same and different to ours. After the discussion, everyone made a double bubble comparing and contrasting their life to Angela's. We were surprised to learn that even though her daily life looks very different than ours, we have a lot of things in common with her as well. For example, we found we all love to eat pizza and watermelon!

On Wednesday we read Polar Bear, Polar Bear What Do You Hear? This is a fun book because the kids pick up on the pattern pretty quickly and can help read along. After reading we brainstormed our own list of animals and the sounds they make. Each student completed a page for a class book by following the story pattern. They did such a nice job!

On Thursday we read a little more about life in the Arctic and the Inuit people. We had a discussion about their way of life and how it is very different than ours, but that doesn't make it bad, just different.  Each student put together an Inuit person and wrote 3 facts they learned on the body.

Friday we had a little fun and painted an arctic scene. We did this as a directed drawing, and as we drew each piece of the scene we reviewed what we had learned. Did you know it only takes two hours to build an igloo? Neither did we!

Penguins!

Sorry for the lack of updating; I've fallen a bit behind in the blog! I'm going to try to do a really quick catch up, then be more on top of it starting this week.

The last 2 weeks we studied Penguins. We read ALL of the Tacky the Penguin books (which everyone just LOVES) and we spent some time discussing character traits in regards to Tacky. As a connection between reading and writing, we wrote our very own Tacky stories. Each student was responsible for creating their own character like Tacky and following the story frame to write about their character. Each story told why their character was odd, what the problem was, how the friends tried to fix the problem, and finally how their original character did solve the problem. These turned out SO cute!  Here is an excellent example:

We finished off our penguin unit learning a bit of nonfiction information about penguins. We read a few books together, and did some research on pebblego.com. After learning about the different kinds of penguins, each student completed this worksheet as sort of a key to help them identify the different types:

The next day, they put their knowledge to use and created their own penguin. Each student had to choose one of the penguins we learned about and use construction paper to make that penguin. They were allowed to use their penguin "key" we made the day before as a reference. This was a fun project, but also a good assessment piece to see what they knew about how the different penguins looked.

Emperor Penguin

Macaroni Penguin

One more fun thing we did this week was measure ourselves against a life size picture of an Emperor penguin! We learned from pebblego.com that the Emperor is the largest of all the penguins, standing at about 4 feet tall. We taped our penguin to the back of the door and each student got to come up to see how they measured up.  We found that the Emperor penguin is about the same size as the average first grader! A few of us were a tiny bit taller or shorter, but most of us were almost the exact same size (well, except for me of course haha)! How exciting! Here you can see how we measure up as a class:

Autumn

This week we have been studying the season fall. It seems a little out of place to do this unit so late, but since Thanksgiving fell so early this year we sort of had to squeeze it in when there was time.

We found that PebbleGo was a GREAT nonfiction resource to help us study this season. Each day this week we read one section on PebbleGo. After reading, we practiced retelling facts as a class and then each student was asked to record 3 facts on a special leaf shaped paper and illustrate. Yesterday, we completed our last page, created a cover, and stapled it all together to make a book.

Thanksgiving: Part 1

Yesterday we started our 7 day unit on Thanksgiving! This is always one of my favorite times of the year. So much to learn, and so many fun projects to complete with the kids!

We started out the unit reading a nonfiction text about the first Thanksgiving. We had a great discussion about how important it is to be thankful for what you have. The kids were shocked to hear that the Pilgrims had such a hard life. They completely understood why they wanted to have a celebration in thanks for what they survived and the life they had. We started working on a special project, but sorry parents, it's a surprise! I'll post about it at the end of the week :)

Today we used pebblego.com to read about Squanto. We wrote an informative paragraph about his life by choosing the most important piece of information from each section on the site and putting them together to create a complete nonfiction piece. To add something cute to the project we made a Native American head peeking out of the top of the reports. They turned out great!

After the students finished with their report they made their own Native American headdress. Unfortunately, I did not get a picture of these. We talked about how the Native Americans did not write using letters like we do; they used symbols to represent different ideas. We looked at some examples of Native American symbols and each student choose some to draw on their headband. We completed the headband by adding 4 different colored feathers. Super cute!