It's Fall Y'all & A Look at My Week

I LOVE fall!!! I love the fall weather, pumpkins, Halloween!!  And... I especially enjoy the season in my first grade classroom!  Spiders, bats, pumpkins, apples, fire safety, Christopher Columbus... I could go on and on!  I love teaching with a theme and fall is the perfect season for "theme" teaching! I also love the fact that my students are really into the classroom routine! And... as a bonus I got to get rid of the rainforest vines and put up fall leaves, spiders, and bats!!! I think my favorite thing is my new spider and bat table headers that I added to my units!

 Here is a little look at what we've been up to lately....     SPIDERS

We have been reading a ton of informational books about spiders. This week we learned to apply the nonfiction reading strategy. {SQ3R - Survey, Question, Read, Retell, Review} I love this reading strategy because it really gives the kids a PURPOSE for reading and helps to keep them engaged! 

First,  we surveyed the book. We looked at the cover, picture, words in bold, diagrams, etc.

Next, we set a purpose for reading and created questions to guide our reading.

After reading the story, the kids turned {knee to knee} to a friend to RETELL what they learned. We then reviewed the story to see if we left out any key details in our retelling.

This week we have also been focusing on the main idea & details in a story. Next week we are going to make the reading/writing connection by writing informational paragraphs about spiders.

(side note - I probably should have made sure the details were accurate before taking a picture!!)

I have taken SPIDERS to the extreme in my classroom!! I hate spiders... but really enjoy teaching about it!  Of course, we had to have a spider to observe!

We learned about spider structures and functions and completed these activities....

My kiddos also did an amazing job on their spider reports.  Ignore the blue blob! I used sticky tack to cover up the student names!

 

We had fun learning about the different kinds of spider webs!  And... the best part was going on a web hunt!!!!

We made these adorable spider glyphs!!!

And then we used the information to create a graph and answer questions.

My bulletin board now looks like this....

In math, we have been working like crazy on patterns!! We got into groups and made patterns with our bodies, drew patterns on our slates, and then we made our own patterns with candy corn.  So much fun!!

We also talked about even and odd number patterns and sorted our dominoes into three columns! {both even, both odd, even & odd}

And last, we learned about patterns on the number grid! My students are learning that they can add 10 to any given number by going down one on the number grid! We completed this cute (adding 10) hidden spider activity.

Shew... I'm tired just thinking about it all!!! And.. we still have more spider activities planned for next week! Spider hats, life cycle craft, informative writing..... and more!!! You can find all of these activities in my Spiders: A Creepy Crawly Extravaganza unit by clicking here.