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Wishing You Falala Holiday Card

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Showing Thanks

This Thanksgiving I want to work with my students on noting the items they are thankful for. One of the activities we are doing is creating a paper chain. Each day we discuss as a class things we are thankful for. We then take a vote and add one of those things to our chain. We'll have a nice little chain by Thanksgiving.

At home we are doing something similar. Instead of a paper chain I have put up ribbon and clothespins. Each day we write down things we are thankful for and add them. 

Just a nice, quickie idea for your classroom and/or home. 

Pumpkin Persuasion Paper

As we get closer to Halloween I love doing a mini unit on pumpkins. This year we read two pumpkin stories: The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons and Pumpkin Circle: The Story of a Garden by George Levenson.

After reading these stories I did an activity I found on Pinterest on the life cycle of a pumpkin. You can access the activity here. The entry is dated November 11, 2010.

After that I have the students do a Pumpkin Persuasion Paper. I tell the students that they are no longer humans, but pumpkins in my pumpkin patch. I want to pick one of them to take home and carve for my Halloween Jack O' Lantern. I tell them that they don't want to be picked and carved up, so they have to write to me to convince me why they are NOT the pumpkin to pick. 

I have learned over the years that I really need to emphasize that they are not humans, but pumpkins. Sometimes, they don't get that and think that I want to carve them up! The ideas they come up with are really great! I have included the directions and a pumpkin template here and here.

Enjoy!

Making Sentences

A fun activity students can do when working on making sentences is they can cut out words from a magazine and put them together to make a sentence making sure that the first word they find starts with a capital letter. They can write in the punctuation. They would also need to make sure they have a subject and predicate. Then they can illustrate their sentence. Here is an example of one that one of my students did. 

Predicate Dice Game and Daily 5 Tip.

          On Friday I was looking for a fun and engaging way to teach my students subject and predicate (which in our reading series is called naming part and action part.) While the children were watching a subject/predicate song from good old School House Rock, I quickly whipped together (hence why it looks so sloppy) a die with predicates written on it. I then picked the students randomly and those students had to do the predicate while the class a.) Said the subject part of the sentence (the students) and b.) guessed what the predicate part was. This was a quick little activity that the students had a blast with. If you wanted you could make several different predicate dice so that you wouldn't have too many chances of a repeat predicate.

          This year I am implementing Daily 5 and CAFE into my classroom for the first time. So far so good. We are going to start our first cycle tomorrow. I am nervous, but excited at the same time. A tip I wanted to mention is that if your school has iPads that the students can access you can do Listen to Reading with them. If you are familiar with TumbleBooks, you can have the students use their site to listen to a wide variety of books. You can usually access TumbleBooks for free through your local library. Another site I stumbled upon, I believe through Pinterest, is Kids AOL. They also have a selection of books including many Arthur books. Now, here's the trick. Both of these sites require Flash Player to work. iPads are not Flash compatible.....or are they? For $3.00 you can download a web browser called Puffin that will run flash on it. It is sssssooo worth the money. There are so many more things I can do on the iPad now that it can be Flash Compatible. Definitely worth checking out!

Synonym Toast

        I'm sure there are tons of variations of this activity. As a child I always had a hard time saying synonym, and wanted to replace it with cinnamon. Also as a child one of my favorite breakfast treats was toast with cinnamon/sugar on it. Put these two things together and you get synonym toast. I printed out the toast templates, wrote words on them and laminated them. I then made a "cinnamon" blob to go on top. On those I wrote the synonyms that match the words on the toast. The students then have to match and write down the synonyms creating synonym toast. You can access the templates here. Enjoy!

How to Build a Snowman

Last winter I was working on directions writing with my students. The main focus was on the Chinese New Year Day we had at school, but one of my students was absent and missed it. As an alternate assignment I had him write the steps of how to build a snowman. In our brainstorming we thought that it would be best to write the final draft in the actual order in which one builds a snowman; from the bottom up! It came out really neat!

First, (is the bottom of the snowman)
Next, (is the middle of the snowman)
Then, (is the snowman's head)
Last, (is decorating the snowman)

Unfortunately, the one photograph I have is not very good, but it will have to do. :-)

A Place to Share

Let me start by saying THANK GOD FOR PINTEREST!!! I am in love with all the ideas Pinterest has to offer. I live on there looking for awesome ideas for my classroom. On the flip side, I want to be able to give back and share some ideas of my own. I figure the best way to do this is to create a blog. This way fellow teachers are connected to a link with the materials they need instead of only a picture. Here is my first lesson/idea.

The Circle Story

Students can write their own circle story in the style of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff. 

 First we read as a class many of the Laura Joffe Numeroff books. Then I created a graphic organizer for the students to work on their stories. What I did was I cut out large circular pieces out of construction paper. In the center I wrote If You Give a _______________________ a ____________________. At the top of the circle I wrote Start/Finish. I then put 7 dots evenly spaced around the circle like a clock.  The students first write down their title making sure that the animal they pick and what they give the animal both start with the same letter i.e. If You Give an Aardvark an Apple. The students then wrote their ideas for their story on post it notes sticking them around the circle where the dots were making sure that it would lead back to their start because in a circle story the start and finish were the same. They then did a first draft of their story, and a final draft including illustrations. They had a great time doing this activity and they really soared with this creative opportunity. This lesson takes about 5+ 45 minute sessions to complete. 

Cute lesson, and my kids loved it!