One story we read in our Harcourt Trophies anthology was Turtle Bay, a tale about a boy named Taro who has a special friendship with an old man named Jiro-San. Everyone, including Taro's sister Yuko, thinks Jiro-San is strange because he spends hours on the beach listening to the wind and sweeping the sand. When Jiro-San reveals special friends--sea turtles-- are going to arrive to lay their eggs the children help him prepare by cleaning the beach. Science and reading were integrated when the class discussed the author's purpose in writing the story and the importance of taking care of the ocean. The children created Styrofoam bowl sea turtles, their limbs and shells displaying story elements such as characters, setting, problem, and solution for our "Sea of Story Elements" display...
The craftivity is available at my TPT store:
Turtle Bay Story Elements Craftivity
One of our 1st writing mini lessons was learning good writers "Show Not Tell" using descriptive language. Students practiced this by writing a paragraph describing a specific emotion they felt using vivid language. They then drew self-portraits revealing the emotion they were describing...
We then moved into our poetry unit. First, we created a "Poetry" bubblemap to explore what poetry is. Students created "Types of Poetry" flipbooks to learn about list poems, acrostic poems, diamantes, haikus, and limericks. The children used graphic organizers to generate ideas for their own poetry, including biography poems, "Fall is..." list poems, "Bubblegum" acrostic poems, and season haikus. Here's our "Fall is..." list poems...
our bio poem paper plate people...
and our "Bubblegum" acrostic poems...
In language arts, we studied the 4 types of sentences (statements, questions, commands, exclamations) and subjects and predicates. We're now learning about a variety of nouns. Students created "6 Types of Nouns" flipbooks to learn about common, proper, plural, irregular plural, and possessive nouns. One of the grammer games we've played to identify nouns was "Common and Proper Nouns Are Outta This World." Each student received an alien ship and had to identify the noun on it as common or plural, then place it in the correct column...
The activity is available for free at Somewhere Between 1st and 3rd's TPT store.
"The Human Body" was our 1st science unit. The class participated in a variety of hands-on exploration to learn about body systems and organs. Some of the activities were attaching velcro organs onto a student wearing a body vest, creating body systems flipbooks, and creating paper bag bodies with labeled organs...
The unit also included learning about nutrition and the effects of drugs and alcohol. Below is the flannelboard food pyramid we used to identify which food group certain foods belong to...
It was a great start to the school year!
Happy learning!
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