Wild Things and Thanksgiving!

November has been incredibly busy in first grade! I can't believe it's almost over and that December is just around the corner!

We got off to a wild start in November with a week long study of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. This is one of our favorite books and the students loved it as well! We did a lot of activities out of this unit! During Reading we practiced using our context clues to figure out the meaning of unknown words and the students loved learning words such as mischief, rumpus, gnashed, tumbled, and private. During Writing we did a descriptive writing project in which the students used torn paper to create their own wild things and then they wrote descriptions of their creatures.

For our reading response journals the students wrote about a time they acted like a wild thing and got into mischief. They also practiced writing apology letters for that mischief!

After all of this wild fun, we moved into talking about Thanksgiving! We practiced making inferences while we read several fun Thanksgiving stories. After reading Gracias the Thanksgiving Turkey we did our reading response for book tree. The students wrote what they were thankful for and made their own turkeys.

We also practiced skip counting using turkey feathers!

One of the students' favorite projects was using cut paper to disguise a turkey and then practicing their how to writing to describe the process. We used this awesome how to writing packet for the writing templates!
One of the students' favorite turkeys was created by one of my sweet ESL students who turned his turkey into Scooby Doo!

Finally, we celebrated Thanksgiving with a special treat! Ms. Arbogast's class had a little feast like the one in Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving and Ms. Shivers's class made no bake pumpkin pies! We are grateful to all of the families that donated items for these celebrations!

Now comes my favorite time of year! Check back soon for posts about our Laura Numeroff author study, Strega Nona character study and of course, all of the Christmas fun that will be happening soon!