Earth Day

We spent most of our day Tuesday focused on ways we can help the Earth.  We started by sharing a book titled The Earth and I.  It helped to show how we rely on the Earth just as it relies on us.  When it is happy we are happy, and when it is sad we are sad.  We created a poster to show all of the ways we can show that we love the Earth.  We read about a hero of sorts who comes in whenever a town is need of a clean up.  His name was Michael Recycle.  We talked about materials that can be recycled and why it helps the environment.  We also used that story to introduce the affix "re-".  We used words like "reduce", "reuse", and "recycle" to show that "re" means again when it is placed in front of a verb.  We made a list of all of the words with "re-" we could think of. 

We also took part in an Earth Day rotation.  We had 2 guest speakers come talk to us about helping the environment.  One was from Progressive Gardens.  He explained composting and how it not only helps the environment by getting rid of trash that would normally fill a landfill, but also gives us soil to use to grow new things. We loved seeing all of the worms at work! Mr. York, a biologist, came to talk to us about how we can protect the water from harmful chemicals like oil and pesticides.  We watched a video about how to protect ocean animals and created Earth Day posters.

Down on the Farm

I think the most important thing we came away with in our learning about the farm, is that the farm is pretty important to us all.  We discovered that there are different types of farms.  Some raise animals and some that grow things like vegetables, fruits, and grains.  We spent most of the week focuses on the animals that are raised on the farm.  We created a farm animal book over the course of the week.  We used tree maps to organize our thinking about each animal.  The tree maps helped us to put together complete sentences about the animals we were focused on that day.  Here are some samples from our writing. 

We couldn't have a farm unit without reading Mrs. Wishy Washy stories.  She is one of my favorites.  We started with Mrs. Wishy Washy.  All of her animals loved the mud!  Each animal rolled, splashed, or jumped in the mud.  After retelling this story in a pocket chart, we used talked about adding -ed to the end of a verb.  We made a list of other animals and the action they would use in the mud.  We learned about the different sounds of -ed ("t" like in "jumped"; "ed" like in "wanted"; and "d" like in "played").  Here is our list of animals. 

We also made inferences about Mrs. Wishy Washy after reading a few stories about her. 

We read and compared 2 stories The Flea's Sneeze and Baa-Choo (which we "read" on my Nook using the data projector).  These were 2 really fun stories about farm animals who had a case of the sniffles and sneezes.  We had also created a story map to go along with The Flea's Sneeze.  This story reminded us an awful lot of The Napping House!

We learned about all of the things that we use/eat that animals can provide.  We used grocery store ads to show just how much starts off at the farm before it ends up at the store.  We cut out pictures of everything that comes from the farm and loaded them onto the back of our truck. 

Finally, we talked about the farmer himself.  We listed everything he uses and the many jobs he has.  We wrote about what we do if we were farmers. 

On Friday, we made ice cream from scratch!  It was so crazy I forgot to take any pictures!  It turned out pretty good and was tons of fun!  We used farm animals to help us learn addition fact families this week too!



Once upon a time..

Who doesn't love a good fairy tale?  I, for one, have always been rather fond of them.  I love how there are so many different versions out there.  They are such a valuable tool in teaching students about story elements like characters, problems, and solutions.  All fairy tales have good characters and the not so good characters that usually have some kind of problem with each other that must be solved.  We read as many fairy tales as we possibly could fit into one week, and I wish we could have read more. :-)  We had so much fun with all of the neat projects and writing we worked on during this unit.  Man, I sure do love Pinterest.  We have found some of the most adorable activities for our units just by doing a little searching.  Check out a few of the things we created during our magical fairy tale week!

Here are our Rapunzel towers!  Girls wrote about what they would do if locked in a tower, and boys wrote about how they would rescue someone locked in a tower. 

We read a few different versions of Cinderella and wrote about what we would ask for if we had a Fairy Godmother.  Aren't these cute??  This came from Life In First Grade. 

We made these watches to show how Cinderella changed over time in the story (beginning to end). 

We read the traditional story of The Princes and the Pea and Ms. Herron found this book

that tells the story from the Pea's perspective.  Now that's a new way of looking at things.  It was great to talk about point of view and voice. We created this visual to go with a writing about what makes a good princess (also from Life in First Grade).


We also read Jack and the Beanstalk and created the characters and other story elements to put on a giant beanstalk.

We read Dusty Locks and the Three Bears and created this news clipping about her heinous crimes!!
This activity and the Wanted poster described below came from a fairy tales unit I got on TpT.  Click here to see the unit. 

We chose one of our "evil" characters to create a wanted poster for on Friday. 

 

Check out the amazing castle Ms. Schiffer created to display all of our fairy tale work!  Isn't she awesome??

The best though was our Reader's Theatre on Friday.  We split into small groups and were given a fairy tale script.  Each person had a part to play.  The groups were given time to rehearse and work out any actions/voices.  Then each group performed their fairy tale.  This was soo much fun!!  I cannot even tell you how impressed we were with each and every child!!  We will definitely be doing this again!!!  I will try to add videos soon!

Eggs-cellent week...

Okay, so I am way behind on keeping my blog up to date. So sorry. It seems that spring fever has struck me just as much as the kids. I promise to try and keep it updated each week. :-)

Here are some photos from our week about Oviparous animals. We spent the whole week centered around animals that lay eggs. Check out some of our work:

 

Our applications to be the new Easter Bunny.  We had some pretty strong candidates.  :-) 

\Our Egg Drop Event - most of our eggs survived the trauma.  :-)