Bears, hedgehogs, and hens...Oh my!

What an exciting week! We were focused on one of my favorite authors/illustrators...Jan Brett. We shared many of her stories this week and looked at the many unique characteristics of her writing/drawing. We created this anchor chart to store all of the new information we were learning about her.

Of course one of the first stories we shared this week was The Mitten. We created this story chart to retell the characters, setting, main events, and author's purpose. The author's purpose was a new one for us, but I thought it would help us next week as we begin to explore nonfiction texts. I thought it was a great grounding point for learning why we need the different texts. We discussed how some authors want to teach us something, some want to change our mind or convince of us something, and some just want us to have fun.

We made mittens with all of the characters to help us practice retelling a story with LOTS of detail and in correct sequence. We read several more of her stories that include Hedgie the hedgehog. Some of the books are pictured below.

We visited Jan Brett's website and watched her video tutorial on how to draw a hedgehog. I had the students follow along on their white boards. We took our new learning to our seats and wrote about Hedgie in our journals. I have such amazing artists!!! You should give it a try http://www.janbrettvideos.com/how_to_draw_a_hedgehog_high_bandwidth.htm!! She has lots more!

We made Hedgie with his accidental hat after reading The Hat. We compared The Mitten and The Hat by creating a venn diagram.

We visualized our perfect pair of mittens and created a bubble map to describe them. We decorated a pair of mittens to match our mental image and hung them out to dry. The next day when we went to get them to write about them, they were gone!!! We felt just like the Three Little Kittens. We decided to create "lost" posters using our bubble maps to help describe the lost mitten. We have our posters displayed in the hallway. Hopefully our mittens will be returned. All week long we have been talking about how animals handle winter. We learned that they have three choices: to hibernate, to migrate, or to adapt (as we do). We learned which animals do each. Here you can see some hibernators peeking out of their warm dens. We discovered that animals do what they have to to find food and stay warm. A big "a-ha" for us was that geese are not the only animals that move or migrate to warmer temperatures. Whales and reindeer are also migrators. Animals can adapt by growing thicker coats of fur, storing food, changing their diet, or even changing the color of their fur to white. We made bird feeders to help out some of our feathered friends.

Here is our special snack: a bear track in the snow!