Monday, January 21, 2013

Penguins Palooza FREEBIES



Penguins Palooza


        I’ve been enjoying my FOUR DAY WEEKEND! Yes, F-O-U-R whole days… it’s been LOVELY! Anyway, I’ve been busy updating things I made last year for my penguins unit (adding fun fonts and cute graphics). Today’s post is brief, so I can get back to enjoying my last day off. Here are some of the penguin things I’ll be doing with my kiddos this week:









Please enjoy the penguin activities- if you have a problem downloading anything please let me know! 
       

Tuesday, January 15, 2013


Penguin FREEBIE


        Today’s post is short and sweet. I’m beginning to feel a bit under the weather and am losing my voice, but I put together this KWL chart for my penguin unit and thought I’d share! Check it out:




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Sunday, January 13, 2013

Bears, Bears, Bears

Bears, Bears, Bears and FREEBIES

        We have been very busy in first grade this week. We started learning about bears, using both fiction and non-fiction books. The week began with Bear Snores On by Karma Wilson (you’re probably familiar with her books, if not you should be), we did a close read with it, and I think had read it about 6 times once we were finished! I purchased a unit on TpT to use with Bear Snores On by Rhonda Baldacchino. It has some great little activities in it, I ended up only using the story map, character match pages, and the sentence scramble/mend it pages, but I look forward to doing more with it next year. It did inspire me to make a few more items for the rest of my bear unit though! 

        Okay, back to what we did. The next book we read was Time to Sleep by Denise Fleming, I love the nonfiction quality of this fictional story. We made a circle story map to sequence story events with pictures and writing. We also looked back in the text to record signs of winter that the animals noticed throughout the story. Then I had them pick one of the signs of winter and complete the following writing assignment. My expectation was that they would write the sign of winter as stated in the story, then they had to write what they know about that particular sign of winter. So, for exampl if they chose to write about how Ladybug heard geese honking good-bye over head, they would write how some birds fly south for the winter to stay warm and eat. 

    
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           On Friday they each completed an information writing page that I found on Pinterest. I went to find the link to the paper, but her site is under construction (click here to check it out). I should also mention that we really just focused on brown bears this week, so that's what they wrote about on the information page. Here's how my kids did: 






       This week we will be reading a few more of the Karma Wilson books, and we’ll also begin learning about Polar Bears and Black Bears. In light of this, I’ve created some Bear activities:

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Click here for your FREE copy

Click here for your FREE copy

Click here for your FREE copy

If you like what you see please let me know- I appreciate it!

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