A Smorgasbord of Theme Work and Writing!

So proud! This is the last post before I am all caught up and ready for life after April vacation! Here's a look at how we spent the last 6 weeks in our classroom; finishing our United States unit and discovering our next theme: living and nonliving things and their habitats!!

To finish our unit on the United States, we filled our sand table with U.S. vocabulary for search and find, had an election using the book Duck for President and finished our "Where I Live" wall!

This was a good reminder for using and counting tally marks! Yay Duck!

We then started a very exciting unit on living and nonliving things and the habitats in which they live. We used each week to talk about living and nonliving things and discussed and explored one habitat per week.

Here is an anchor chart we did early on. I passed out each of the three item pictures to some of my students after I read the book What's Alive? We then discussed and discovered as a class which of these items was living. They had a HARD time believing plants breathe and eat so we, of course, had to do a set of experiments where we starved a plant of sunlight and water and suffocated it. YIKES! That taught them...

Here's one of our writing prompts about being a good citizen to our habitat and environment-"helping my baby brother"

Forest animal station. They bees used books to help them find their favorite forest animal and then they drew them within their habitat.

 "A squirrel"

We're working really hard on recognizing our shapes, so this pattern block center was a must!

I found a wonderful habitat book at https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Biomes-Literacy-Activity-Desert-Rainforest-Forest-Grassland-Tundra-1270844 and used it as an assessment for the end of each habitat study. The children used their previous and learned knowledge and visual cards to pick an animal of choice for each habitat, write its name, trace the sentence, and then draw the animal in its habitat.

We loved this art project for the grasslands: marble painting zebras!

We sorted wants and needs of living things (we decided humans in particular). This activity sparked wonderful discussion about why we need some things and what it means to want. They are quite the intellectuals!

Here's a cute flip book we made for the desert that helps the kiddos practice reading a predictable sentence and learn some desert vocabulary.

This served as an end of unit assessment table where the students worked in small groups to place three animals in each habitat. There are picture cards and also a set of word cards for the readers.

This was a living and nonliving sort used as an assessment at the end of week 2.

Here's one of our vocabulary word walls for the habitat unit: The Rainforest!

we added vines to our classroom library, of course.

We also did a whole group sorting activity with the animals of the rainforest. The bees were so taken by the awe and structure of the rainforest that we decided to delve deeper to discover where each of the animals of the rainforest makes its home. Instead of using a paper cut, paste, and sort, we built a large three story tree and labeled the levels accordingly. We then read The Umbrella and The Great Kapok Tree and learned where each of these amazing creatures lives. I then took printed pictures of each of the animals and let the whole class sort and glue them onto the right layer. It was so much fun and was a great discussion starter for why each animal chooses the home it does. 

When the weather began to warm up, we took our study of living and nonliving things outdoors. We went on a nature walk around the school and drew and labeled things in our life that are living and nonliving. So much fun to apply our new knowledge to real-life things!

Here's a friend who is not very fond of drawing, but it excellent with reading and writing.

Here is a friend who is new to the English language, but is very capable of drawing what he knows.

 Heres another assessment I used after we finished discussing the rainforest and the desert. The bees cut and paste the animals according to where they live!

Here's a few of our habitat crafts!

Rainforest Monarchs; looks beautiful in the windows!

crafting a bear cave (which doubled as a lions den) for the sensory table

Here's our desert sunset collage (ideally, the entire paper would be covered with sunset colored paper strips before the shadow cut outs are added...)

making leopard faces- of COURSE! we painted a paper plate yellow then added thumbprint black spots, googley eyes, and some ears!

Making coral reef structures during our ocean study. We used pink packing peanuts and toothpicks with a little glue to hold them into the "ocean".

We also finished our first two chapter books as a class. I love to read aloud some advanced texts to the bees to keep them engaged, expose them to different text types, and push their understanding of complex texts. We read Snow Monsters Do Drink Hot Chocolate and Flat Stanley: His Original Adventure.  Here's a few activities we did surrounding these texts!

Writing prompt for the book Snow Monsters Do Drink Hot Chocolate. "My favorite part is that he was not a monster"- (at the end of the book the characters found out the snow monster was not real! Go figure! ) Great comprehension work from a very limited English speaker. 

A character web about the main character's little brother, Arthur. We used this as a interactive writing piece. We discussed the character and his traits and the evidence that shows that he is all of these adjectives. Great first grade work, bees!

We also made a sequence chart so that we could see all of the story parts from beginning to end.