Spiders!

We had a great time this week reading and learning about spiders.  It was a great introduction to fiction and non-fiction books.  We began the week reading Eric Carle's The Very Busy Spider.  The children loved the repetitiveness of this book, and soon chimed in right along with me.   I made sequencing cards with DJ Inkers clip art for the children to wear when we re-read the story on Tuesday.  We were supposed to make a list of all our characters in our reader's workshop notebooks, but that never happened! Time got away from us!  I also forgot to snap a picture of the children with the re-telling cards! I'll do that this week! 

 

Here are a couple of spider activities that we did in our math centers that I posted earlier.

 This is the Jill Egglton poem that we read throughout the week.  On Friday, we highlighted all of the S's and illustrated the poem.  I was so proud of this little guy! It was the best drawing of  a person that he has ever done! He copied mine, but it's a start, right??!

 We also played a fun game called "Spill the Spiders."  This is another one of Kim Adsit's fabulous ideas!  Put a select number of items in a container.  Sit in a circle and pass around the container until you stop the music.  When the music stops, the child will dump out the spiders and count them back into the container.  This is great for one-to-one correlation as well as counting skills.  I've done this a few times with other seasonal things, the kids LOVE it! I keep adding a few each time so it gets progressively harder.  You could also have them count backwards when taking the spiders out (just tell them how many there are to start!)

My mom was cleaning out her Halloween decorations just in time to give me this great spider web! We brainstormed words that start with /s/ and added them to our spider web.  I also had a GIGANTIC spider web that I hung from the ceiling! I wish I would have taken a picture of it before I took it down to hang up our spider glyphs!

We also read many non-fiction books about spiders.  We made a chart like this one from Deanna Jump's Blog.

 I used 2 experiments from Deanna's Simple Science packet - the children LOVED them!

 First, we did an experiment to learn how spiders kill and eat their prey.

Then we did an experiment to understand why spiders don't stick to their webs!  You can find the directions for the experiment as well as the response sheets at TPT .

I had planned to read this book as part of our preparation for our spider glyphs, but when I went to get it out on Friday - it wasn't in my lesson plan drawers.  Hmmmm.... I think my wonderful 3 1/2 year old swiped it out of my school bag and it never got to school! Oh well.. I had a back-up plan.

 

We read this version instead - the children LOVED it!

Earlier in the week we read this book:

 

Using these two books, we created a fun spider glyph! (Although my hand still hurts from cutting out those little spider legs!)

 We then analyzed our data from our glyphs.  This glyph as well as a great emergent reader (and many other spider activities that I didn't have time for) can be found in Deanna's Spiders packet on  Teachers Pay Teachers.

We also did a sorting activity on the whiteboard that came from Mailbox Magazine.

 

At the end of the week, we made a venn diagram comparing and contrasting elements of fiction and non-fiction books.  These are also on Kim's Reading Comprehension packet.  I forgot to snap a picture, so here is the picture from Kim Adsit's website 

Up next...oceans!

Text-to-Self Connections

This week's focus book was Plaidypus Lost.   I have to admit, this book was not one of my favorites until the author, Susan Stevens Crummel, visited our school last year.  She made the book come alive when she read it to us and gave us the background behind it.
 

 

I used this book to teach text-to-self connections.  In the story, the little girl loses her beloved plaidypus that her grandmother made for her from her grandpa's old shirt.  However, the little girl was not responsible (a vocabulary word that we talked about with this book) and misplaced (another vocab word!) her friend in many different places.  Before we began reading the book, I asked the children to think of a time they lost something special to them; how did it make them feel?  Did they ever find it?  Did someone help them find it?  And so on...I wanted them to get a good mental image so they could good make strong text-to-self connections.

After we read the story and talked about our connections and wrote about them in our Reader's Workshop journal.  This page is from Kim Adsit's Reading comprehension pack at Teacher's Pay Teachers.

 

We also completed a story map together created from an example on Kim Adsit's site.

 We made a list of all the places they were in the story as well as all of the characters.  The children each signed up for one that they would like to draw and they created it for our flow map. (I'll post a picture of the sign-up chart later, I must have forgotten to snap one!)  Here are pictures of the flow chart that we created.  They children were very excited about how looonnnggg it was!  They did a wonderful job re-telling the story to help create the flow map.

We also read the book, A Platypus Probably and discussed the differences between fiction and non-fiction texts.  We talked about the most important things we learned about a platypus and labeled the parts of a platypus in our science journal. (I'll post a picture later, I forgot again!)