Fairy Tales: Little Red Riding Hood

This week we are learning about Fairy Tales! We started off the unit by discussing what makes a fairy tale special and what elements to look for in a story to determine if it is a fairy tale or not.

(sorry about the glare, I had this chart laminated)

Next, we read our first fairy tale: Little Red Riding Hood! After reading we filled out this chart to see which of the fairy tale elements were in the story. We determined that Little Red Riding Hood is in fact a fairy tale because it contains each of the 7 elements.

After that each student was able to create their own finger puppet play to practice retelling the story to their friends and family. We used paper bags to create the scenery: one side for the forest, the other side for the grandmother's bedroom.

Finally, everyone created these cute little finger puppets. Some of my friends were disappointed that there was not a finger puppet for the hunter in the story, so using scrap paper they created their own!

These should have come home yesterday in each student's folder. Ask your child to retell and act out the story for you tonight!

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!

Coffee Filter Art - Monsters!

We finished off our monster unit on Friday with a bang.

After reading Jeremy Draws a Monster on Thursday, we read Go to Bed Monster on Friday. These two books are very similar, so after reading we reviewed the story from the day before and talked about things that were the same and different by looking at the different story elements. Then the students created their own double bubble comparing the two stories. They did great!

Since it was "Fun Friday" and the end of our monster unit, I found this super fun monster art activity from Housing a Forest. To make these monsters, the students were each given a coffee filter and asked to color the entire thing, in any pattern they wanted, using marker. After it was colored, we sprayed it down with water and pressed it between two pieces of paper. When we peeled back the coffee filter what was left on the paper was the basis for our monster. I have made coffee filter art before, but never like this. I love the way the colors transfered to the paper and the great texture it left. I think it looks even better than the tie dyed coffee filter! The kids were amazed at the color transfer. I just love teaching them new simple ways to create art.  They cut the print out and used white and black paper to add the finishing details. Look how cute they are!

Here are a few up close so you can see the awesome texture left by the color transfer:

What a fun way to end our week!

Story Map Sticky Notes

This morning we read the book Jeremy Draws a Monster and used our story map again to discuss the different story elements. However, this time, I let the kids do ALL the work and I must say they impressed me.  I had each student bring a notebook and pencil to the carpet with them. I passed out a sticky note which they stuck to their notebook for something hard to write on.  I assigned each row on the carpet a different element to listen for (ie one row listened for characters, one for setting, one for problem, and one for solution). I read the story and while I read they used their pencil to write words and draw pictures representing their story element.  After reading each student got to come up and add their sticky note to the chart while sharing what they wrote. 

I'm so proud of the great work they did! We will definitely be using sticky notes more often as a whole class activity now that I know how responsible they can be with them.

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!