November in a Nutshell

Good grief...when did November get here? I feel like I was just getting excited about it being October!

 After reminiscing through all my November activities, I've decided to put them altogether in one post to help ease your planning needs! 

Below you will find all the fun things we do with turkeys, Pilgrims, and Thanksgiving galore--all grouped by subject. Here is my November in a nutshell!

I came across this template several years ago from The First Grade Parade.

We add feathers each year to our turkey depending upon which phonetic skill we are working with.

The past 2 years they have been 'blend turkeys' and 'digraph turkeys'.

I just love running across cute ideas from other teacher bloggers.

This one comes from Reagan.

We've been talking about verbs so this activity fit perfect into our week.

We read Run Turkey Run and recorded turkey verbs.

Student then chose a verb and created a sentence to mirror that of the title.

"Fly Turkey Fly"

"Snap Turkey Snap"

We always review our knowledge of fact families by making fact family turkeys.

Some years I give my kids the 3 numbers to work with and others I let them generate their own.

It depends on my group from year to year.

I have them write the 3 numbers on the turkey head and the feathers are the facts.

This precious idea comes from Around the Kampfire.

What kid doesn't love THE Pigeon!?!?

Students have to try to persuade others why they should eat hot dogs instead of turkey for Thanksgiving! 

Alliterations are SO much fun! 

What we do is brainstorm words that start with the letter 'T' and record them on our 'turkey words' chart.

Then I have students make their turkey and name him/her.

They pick 4 words from our chart and write an alliteration sentence about their turkey!

Using my It's Thanksgiving Unit (see below), we study pilgrims.

We compare how they lived to how we live.

Students complete a rip art pilgrim and respond to the following:

"If I were a pilgrim boy/girl......"

Last but not least I'm sharing my It's Thanksgiving unit with you. It's packed full of Thanksgiving goodness.

It's a literacy and social studies unit that can be accompanied by any fiction or non-fiction books.

It includes:

-Turkey can/have/are organizer

-Children then and now venn diagram
-Describing Pilgrims bubble map
-Describing Native Americans bubble map
-If You Give A Pilgrim A Pumpkin Pie... writing activity
-Making words with 'Pilgrims'
-Making words with 'Turkeys'
-Thanksgiving ABC order
-Making singular nouns plural with Thanksgiving words

**Grab it on sale for the next 2 days**

Hoping my nutshell of a post gave you some ideas for this month!

It's Fall in the Hall

One thing I love to do whether it's at home, in the classroom, or school hall is decorate!
And tis' the season for adding a little touch of pumpkin to every aspect of life.
It may not quite be October yet, but last week we broke out the pumpkins and got down to business.

I'm sure you can tell by the picture below what we have been studying, grammar wise.

We've been practicing sorting nouns into categories of person/place/thing.

One activity we did this week was illustrate our own nouns.

Each day I gave them the category: person, place or thing.

They came up with their own idea, illustrated it and wrote the word for it.

We put them on the big green chart. Now we have 20 people, places and things to refer to. 

Here's a close up look of our noun pumpkins.

They had to search through magazines to find pictures of 4 people, places and things. 

They turn out super cute and gave our hallway just the right amount of  "fallish" feel! 

Let's Do Literacy with Pumpkins

It's Fall y'all!

Time to break out all things pumpkin, including literacy centers.

This summer I totally revamped one of my very first creations I made for TpT. 

Here's peak into what is include in my Pumpkin-y Literacy Centers pack:

{Click picture above for link to TpT store}

These simple centers are great for the beginning of the year.

I can't wait to put mine into action this week!

Mission: Makeover ALL the Products

That's my new mission! Makeover ALL the products...or though it seems.

I'm embarrassed when I went back and looked at my very first product to post on TpT.

{Take a look as I hang my head in shame...}

I cannot even tell you how bad it needed updated!

And boy have I learned a lot since those days.

Here is what I changed:

*cover

*fonts

*added 2 new centers

*new recording sheets

I'm super excited to show you what my "like new" product now looks like!

Check it out in my TpT store on sale for the next 3 days! 

The Great Pumpkin Investigation

Trying to fit it all in...seems impossible most days.

That's one reason why integrating across subjects is vital to fitting it all in!

We took the theme of pumpkins this week and learned about them all across the board!

Here's a little bit about our pumpkin-y kind of week!
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GRAMMAR ACTIVITY

We looked through magazines and sorted nouns into the 3 categories of person, place, and thing.
We then glued them on to our pumpkins.

Our nouns pumpkins grace our hallway like a pumpkin patch!


READING/SCIENCE ACTIVITIES
We read The Pumpkin Book to learn some facts about pumpkins
Then we recorded our learning on our 'can/have/are' chart that was shaped like a pumpkin!

We also studied how a pumpkin grows, the life cycle, while reading the book From Seed to Pumpkin.

After whole group discussion, we worked on our sequencing skills and sequenced the steps of the life cycle using pictures from {here} and sentences I typed up to match them.

We reinforced our learning by completing this life cycle chart together.

 The following day they had to apply their new pumpkin schema of the life cycle and complete this little sequencing art activity.

WRITING
We've been trying really hard to write our sentences using correct grammar and punctuation.
  I had them transfer their pictures of the pumpkin's life cycle into sentences.
This writing activity came from Oceans of First Grade Fun. 
Click on the picture for their freebie!

  

MATH/SCIENCE ACTIVITIES

 After learning a little bit about pumpkins, I brought a pumpkin to school for our pumpkin investigation! 

Words cannot explain how excited the kiddos were. Here are a few things we did during our investigation.

{I prepped this chart to hold all of our pumpkin data we observed}

 First, we examined our pumpkin and described what it looked like on the outside.

 Then, I cut the top off and we scooped out the seeds and saved them to count.

We worked on our skip counting by putting the seeds into groups of 10. 

  Putting them all to work, well this took no time at all. I had them estimate how many seeds they thought were inside. We counted by 10's to find our answer and I think we were all surprised by our number of 463!

We practice our measuring skills...

 We measured how tall the pumpkin was with cubes.

As the day went on, we recorded all of our data on our chart. 

Here is our pumpkin investigation data. The kids had their own paper to fill out.

It can be found {here}.

Fitting it all in may seem impossible at times. But it is units like these that help make it all a possibility. 

It's also SO much fun that the kids don't even realize they are hard at work!