Thanksgiving Threw Up in My Classroom

OH.MY. Pretty much sums up how I feel when I walk into my classroom. I’m greeted by dangling turkeys, pilgrims galore, and kid work all over the place…and I LOVE IT. Y’all…this last month…3 weeks, I guess…have been a total whirlwind. I didn’t get a chance to do half the things I wanted to, but I’m okay with it because the kids got JUST what they needed! We’ve been furiously preparing ourselves for our annual Grandparent’s/VIP day tomorrow. It’s our biggest event of the year! The kids get to invite the special people in their lives to come watch them perform the most darling little musical routine. This year the theme is 50’s. LOVE. After the performance, all the families are invited back to the classrooms to browse around and take a look at all the fun things the kids are learning. We’ve been learning SO much and we’re so excited to show it off! Here’s a little peek at what our V.I.P’s will see tomorrow….

This past week we read the story, “I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie”, by Allison Jackson. Of course, the kids loved it and there was SO much we could do with it!! We created a little reader’s response writing craftivity to go along with the story. LOVED the way these turned out!!!

Their writing prompt was, ‘If I were the old lady, I would swallow a…’. They had to write their choice of Thanksgiving fare :) I got pumpkin rolls, turkeys, yellow cake?!, green beans, mashed ‘butatoes’, rolls, etc. SO fun! After they wrote their sentence, they made a little old lady with googly eyes and a hand drawn picture of the food of their choice.

Last week we read “The Amazing Turkey Race!” and did this little craftivity for a readers response…

Loving the one that says, “Eat more loins.” Of course, it’s supposed to say “lions”. Makes me chuckle every time I walk in the room :)

Of course, we’ve also been talking a lot about being thankful and what that means. We created these little pilgrims to hold our ‘thankful writing’ {inspired by First Grade Blue Skies :)}. The kids were thankful for the funniest things…corn dogs, Christmas, biscuits?!…TOO cute!

I noticed that this poor little pilgrim lost his head :( Oooops!

We did our “How to Catch a Turkey” writing {printable from Deanna Jump’s Thanksgiving Math & Literacy Unit}. We read “Run, Turkey, Run!” before our writing and I LOVED the way the kids made the connection between this how-to and the how-to we wrote when we made root beer floats on the 50th day!

The kids get to take home their placemats tomorrow before they leave for the break. We had our Thanksgiving feast the other day and it was PRECIOUS. A whole buncha pilgrims and Indians just feastin’ away :)

SO…the room’s all ready for our VIPS…

And I’m SO excited for my kids to show off ALL their hard work!!!! It’s been a BUSY 3 weeks!!!

**I get lots of questions asking, “How do you fit EVERYTHING in?!?!?”. Ummm…LOTS of planning! HA! Seriously…most of the writing you see is either completed during our Writer’s Workshop block {followed by draft book} OR they complete it at the writing station during our Daily 5/literacy block. All the craftivities are pre-cut {BLESS my sweet student teacher!!!!}, so all the kids have to do is assemble the parts. This usually takes a total of maybe 10-12{ish} minutes. We can fit that in while they’re eating snack or when we get back in the room from lunch. It’s just a matter of planning it and making sure that it all fits with our objectives. We made our placemats during our Social Studies block of time because that took a lot longer!!!Hope that answers your questions!!**

If You Sailed On The Mayflower…

Today we celebrated “Mayflower Day”!! Okay…so I made that up…but I thought that sounded pretty fitting for our day today :) We started by reading a non-fiction book about the Mayflower. I can’t remember which one, but I checked it out from our school library and it was really good!! It was a great book to review Table of Contents also :) Each “chapter” was only a page or two long. After each page, we stopped to jot. During our stop to jot time, the kids gave me a few facts they learned from that chapter.

We learned a lot of really cool facts!! Did you know that the water was so unsafe to drink that everyone on the Mayflower…children included…drank beer?!?! Ummmm…yeah. That interesting tidbit of info was definitely in the book and you should’ve heard the conversations that transpired after reading that fun little fact :) Wow.

After brainstorming, I had the kids choose 5 facts to write about for their Mayflower books. Y’all. These books are DARLING. A few of the girls on our team have been making these “bag boats” for a few years and I LOVE them!!! They’re PERFECT for a little Mayflower fun!!

We compiled all their facts into this little book…

I used pencils to hold up the sails…just incase you’re wondering :)

There were a couple of extra “pages” left in the book, so we filled them in with a thinking map & a survey/graph. We made a Mayflower brace map to show the parts of the whole…

And I also had the kids survey their classmates asking them whether or not they would have liked to travel on the Mayflower if they were pilgrims. Not surprisingly, they all said NO!!!! The kids graphed their classmates responses and wrote about their data as well.

You can download the Mayflower brace map & graph HERE.

Next up….TURKEY FUN!!!

Pilgrim Projects

Our kids are learning about Thanksgiving customs and traditions and we’ve REALLY gotten into learning all about the pilgrims. The kids are FASCINATED!! They just can’t imagine that little pilgrim boys and girls didn’t have DSI’s & American Girl dolls ;) We started learning about pilgrims reading a few realistic fiction & non-fiction books from our library.

We really LOVE this one!!! It’s super informational and it’s got lots of great facts about the Mayflower, pilgrims, and the first Thanksgiving!

We learned that life was different for pilgrim boys than girls. We learned a lot of neat facts about little pilgrim boys & girls. The kids were most amazed that only pilgrim boys were allowed to go to school. We did a little Venn diagram to compare & contrast pilgrim boys & girls.

After we compared boys & girls, I had the kids start a little project. I modeled how to draw both a pilgrim boy & girl in KidPix and then had each of the kids draw themselves as pilgrims on the computer. They also had to choose one fact that we learned and complete the writing prompt, “If I were a pilgrim boy/girl, I would…”

I LOVE how different they all turned out!!

We also learned that pilgrims could only take one trunk full of their belongings on the Mayflower. Most pilgrims only packed clothes, tools, and their Bibles. I made little suitcases for the kids and inside they had to write a list of things they would take with them if they were traveling on the Mayflower…ANYTHING they wanted :) They absolutely LOVED this!!

We also compared boys & girls today to boys & girls from long ago. They had A LOT to say about this one!

After completing our Venn diagram, the kids had a choice between two different writing prompts, I can__________, but a pilgrim could not. OR I have ___________, but a pilgrim did not. Then they got to make their own little pilgrim boys and girls to go with their writing.

Next up: MAYFLOWER! Can’t wait!!