Making Predictions in Nonfiction Text

This week we are continuing our unit on nonfiction. Today we talked about the benefits of a picture walk when reading a nonfiction text. Everyone already knew that when you take a picture walk in a fiction book you are predicting what you think will happen in the story. Today we learned that when you take a picture walk in a nonfiction book you are predicting what you think you will learn about. We talked about how this can help you as a reader to gain meaning from the text when you start to read.

As a class, we looked through a nonfiction book about elephants and wrote down our predictions for each picture. It was neat to see the different ideas each student had. We talked about how as long as you make an educated guess, there is not just one right answer.

Next, students were paired up and had to make predictions about a different nonfiction book together. They did an awesome job working in pairs and discussing what they thought they would learn about!

Tomorrow we are going to go back and read the text to try to confirm our predictions!

Easter Egg Fun

We finished off our week with a little Easter egg fun. Yesterday we started this project, and today we finished it up. Each student was asked to use cut pieces of paper to design their own unique egg.

Then, they were asked to be creative and think of what kind of creature might hatch from that egg. Oh my goodness the creativity was flowing!! I wish I could share all of these with you, they are just that awesome. After students got their creative juices flowing by illustrating their creature, they were asked to write a few sentences describing it and telling some things about it. Here is one great example:

Remember, there is no school tomorrow! Hope everyone enjoys their long weekend. :)

Fairy Tales: Cinderella

Today we finished off our fairy tale unit. I am so sad the week is over because I LOVE fairy tales and there are so many more good ones we did not have time to read!

Today was all about royalty in fairy tales! We started off the morning making our very own crowns and tiaras. We had a crowning ceremony and each student was presented with their crown to wear. We discussed waht it means to be royalty, and how you have to set a good example and be a good leader. We all agreed that as long as you were wearing your crown, today you would be referred to by your prince and princess name. We had a ball with this! Plus, it really promoted good behavior. Double win!

We read the story Cinderella, then looked at each of the elements to see if it qualified as a fairy tale. It did!

hahaha oh my gosh please ignore the fact that I spelled prince wrong! We were in a bit of a rush so everyone could get started working on our daily project. oops!

Next, everyone set to work writing their own original fairy tale starring themself as a prince or princess. Their work turned out so cute!
 

Fairy Tales: Jack and the Beanstalk

We continued our unit on fairy tales today by reading Jack and the Beanstalk. After reading, we looked at our chart to see if this story would qualify as a fairy tale. We had a great discussion of good vs bad characters once again. Some of my friends felt that Jack was a good character because he was trying to help his mom and make her happy. Others felt that he was a bad character because he was stealing things that didn't belong to him. In the end the class decided he was in fact a "bad guy"and that only the mom and the man selling beans were the "good guys". The reasoning was that those two characters did not trick anyone, nor were they mean or doing bad things. Everyone agreed that Jack was naughty, but not necessarily all bad, so they asked me to write that he was "kind of a bad guy".

To retell this story we focusing on the different story elements. Each student created a small beanstalk and wrote about the different elements on each of the leaves (It's hard to see since it's done in pencil, sorry!):

For writing today, we started by reading a mixed up version of this fairy tale. We read a Texas style fairy tale that I just love: Wynetta and the Cornsalk.  Everyone LOVED the "country voices" that were used in the story! We briefly looked over our chart and determined that this was also in fact a fairy tale, even though it was a bit mixed up. We made a connection to this story in the form of a class book. Each student drew themselves climbing the beanstalk and wrote about what they would be willing to climb the beanstalk to get.

Fairy Tales: Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Today we read Goldilocks and the Three Bears. After reading we took a look at our fairy tail elements chart to see if this book fit our definition of a fairy tale. We had a great discussion about good vs bad characters in this story. Some of our friends thought that Goldilocks should be the good character since she was the main character, but many of them argued that she was actually very naughty, and therefore the bad character. After much debate, the class decided that Goldilocks was indeed the "bad guy" of the story, and the 3 bears were the "good guys".

Next, everyone made a little bear book to retell the story using the words first, next, then, and last. We can never get enough practice with this skill!

Fairy Tales: The Three Little Pigs

Today we continued our unit on fairy tales by reading The Three Little Pigs. Everyone loved this story because they could use the pig and wolf voices and help read aloud! After reading the book we looked at our chart to see if the story would qualify as a fairy tale based off of the characteristics:

Then we practiced retelling the story using beginning, middle, and end with this cute chain of pink pigs:

For writing today, we read a mixed up version of this fairy tale. We read The Three Little Fish and the Big Bad Shark. After reading, we talked about how an author goes about making a mixed up fairy tale. Each student was then asked to brainstorm ideas for their very own mixed up version of this fairy tale. Goodness do we have some creative friends in this class!

Over the next week we are going to work on turning our ideas into our very own published versions of this fairy tale!

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:

Back from Break

On Tuesday we were busy busy busy getting back into the swing of things. It was so great to see all the smiling faces  bouding into the classroom.

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!

Our writing project involved writing something about our winter break. We put together this cute person in a snowsuit, and used the handwriting page to write a sentence or two about our break. They turned out really cute:

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!

Elf Antics: Day 1

Boy were we in for a surprise this morning when we got to the classroom! Look where we found our crazy elf Dash!

 The kids were quite literally shrieking with excitement! As each new student walked into the room the ones already there were shouting out to show them where to look. I love seeing that excitement in their little faces!  Dash left us a note on the computer (which I totally forgot to take a picture of, sorry!) explaining that he was excited to be here, reminding everyone he cannot talk to them or move but is happy to listen all day, and that he hoped I didn't mind but he took the liberty of moving all the clips up to green to start the day. Hey, who can argue with one of Santa's magical elves?!?

We got to work right away on our morning work journal. One of the kids suggested that Dash was on a zip line (good schema!) so we included that in our description of what we saw:

The rest of our morning was spent diving in to our week long gingerbread unit. Today we read the original version of The Gingerbread Man. After reading we added cards to our gingerbread house to describe the different elements of the story. Each day this week we will be reading a different version of the story and adding to this chart.

To finish the morning off the kids used pictures of the story to sequence and write sentences. We sure are getting good at using our sequencing words to write sentences!

Check back tomorrow to see what trouble our crazy elf gets himself into!