FREE Center Labels

Hi Everyone! I was curious to see if anyone needed some center labels for their classroom. I posted a few weeks ago how I needed to change my centers, which forced me to make some signs for a rotation board. If you are interested, you can follow this link HERE to get the center labels for FREE.

Coming together

Our nonfiction text features study is finally coming together! We have been working on this for about 2 weeks, and I finally posted their work in the hallway. Forgive the crooked papers...they will be fixed tomorrow, but I was too lazy to do it this afternoon!

The things you see are a mixture of my arctic animals unit and Deanna Jump's arctic animals packet (I adapted her kinder stuff for my second graders).

Arctic Study

Have you ever had just one of those days? Today was one for me. From beginning to end, it was just one of THOSE DAYS! However, I'm now sitting on my couch by myself with a fire in the fireplace (that my sweet husband built for me before he left for work), watching reruns of Duck Dynasty on the t.v. LOVE LOVE LOVE this show! I can't get enough.

Anyways, I wanted to give you an update on our arctic animals/nonfiction study. Everything is blending beautifully. We are getting a lot of discussion for life science while throwing in some nonfiction text features. Here is what it looks like:

I've been starting the lesson by doing a quick intro of the animal we are talking about. I will give them some facts, figure out what they think about the animal, etc. Today we talked about killer whales, so I showed a short 5 minute video from Discovery Education showing how the killer whale hunts for a seal. This led into a lot of discussion! Then we head over to National Geographic Kids and read about the animal. We have been filling out worksheets from my Arctic Animals packet. Here is what yesterday looked like when we talked about Walruses.

They take a short quiz over what we talked about (must get those grades!), and then we move into nonfiction text features. I made a booklet from the Snow Business packet I told you about by Amanda Nickerson (I have a link to this in a post below).  We talk about the feature, add it to an anchor chart, look at some examples, and then I have the students write the definition of the feature in their booklet.

Here is the poster from Amanda's unit (sorry for the glare from the laminate). 

This is the booklet they have. We discuss as a class what we want the definition to be after I show them several examples. 

I made a quick bulletin board for our study. It's not my best work, but it will do! 

NOW it's time to actually create the nonfiction feature. I'm a big fan of having students DO what I want them to learn. I have been using pages from Deanna Jump's arctic animals packet. I picked through the pages and made a walrus booklet that will cover a few of the features.

On the first day, we talked about table of contents, so my students made a table of contents for their booklet. It was pretty basic, and we left a few lines blank so we could add to it if we needed to.

Today we talked about captions, so they added pictures with captions to the book (all of these pages are included in Deanna's packet). I will have to take more pictures tomorrow to show you how awesome the booklets are turning out! I highly recommend this packet from Deanna (you can also find the link in a post below).

So that's pretty much it! They are really having fun with the unit, and I'm confident these concepts are sticking!  I hope this helps anyone who is struggling with nonfiction and how to get started:)

TABLES

So I came back from the break to tables!! When I switched classrooms this year I had to give up my tables (tear). I thought I would like desks, but quickly realized how much I missed my tables. A new teacher was hired over the break, and she wanted desks instead of tables so I JUMPED on that!! My principal was amazing and moved them for me over the break:). Look at how nice and clean they were! (Notice the "were." The kids have been back from the break for a week now...need I say more?)

January Plans

HAPPY NEW YEAR!! I rang in the new year with my husband...on the couch...watching a movie...with our kids in bed. BUT I loved it, and with all the craziness of Christmas, we were grateful for some down time at home. Today our plans consist of shopping for cleaning supplies and bins for storage...sounds super fun, right? 

However, teaching is never far away from my thoughts, and I have been steadily working on an arctic animals unit for my kiddos when we get back! We are going to dive into nonfiction using arctic animals (with a few fiction snowman items thrown in between). I'm SUPER EXCITED about it because I think my kids will really love it. I'm going to divide them into animal groups to study. So they will no longer be "group 1, group 2" when we return, but "walruses, killer whales, etc." They will study their animal in the computer lab, library, books I read, etc, and record what they find on the worksheets I made. I'll be using the National Geographic Kids website, and lots and lots of books! 

In the unit, I included quizzes for each animal after reading about them on National Geographic Kids website. We have to get those grades in!! There is a booklet to create, graphic organizers, sorting activities, and a worksheet to show the difference between the Arctic and Antarctica. You can click on the picture and it will take you to my store! 

I'm also going to be using Amanda Nickerson's Snow Business for nonfiction. She has some GREAT posters and activities in here.

 I'm also going to use Deanna Jump's Arctic Animals unit! This focuses more on walruses and polar bears. It's made for kindergarten, but I know I can adapt a lot the pages. I saw lots of great things in here that my kids are going to go crazy for! 

OH and to celebrate the New Year, everything in my store (including my new unit) is on sale 20% through midnight!