Statue of Liberty Writing

My students are getting really good at writing 5 sentence paragraphs, especially about nonfiction topics.  We've been learning about US symbols and of course I had them write. 

 We did one writing about the Statue of Liberty.  We read a couple of books about the statue and watched a Brainpopjr. video about the statue.

We then made an anchor chart listing things we knew about the Statue of Liberty.

{visualize the anchor chart here since 

I forgot to take a picture}

*sigh* 

We then did our writing and we displayed a craft with our writing that I got from Deanna Jump's America Math and Literacy Fun.

(notice in the picture above - she added a 6th sentence to her writing.  :)

Happy Teaching!

Writing with Picture Clues - Texas

We started learning about the great state of Texas this week.  We are focusing on learning the state symbols this week and next week we will be adding cowboys to the mixture.  Yee Haw!

We did some writing today and mentally put on our "Author's Purpose" hat and tried to persuade our readers to visit the great state of Texas.  I made a writing plan sheet to go with this.  Today our topic was:

"Texas is a nice state to visit."  

Here are what a few of my sweeties wrote:

Their plan sheet looked like this:

(BTW:  Some of my sweeties are forgetting to write their topic sentence so I added a little box for them to check off after they write the topic sentence.) 

Next week, we will be using this plan sheet to write about our state symbols:

If you would like a copy of these plan sheets, you can grab yourself a copy HERE.

If you are using my plan sheets, I would love to hear how they are working out in your classroom!

Thanksgiving Art

I have lots of art to show on this post and in case you are wondering, no, we do not do art all day.  I have 5 centers set up in my room and one of them is the art center.  Students visit that center once a week.  So, to explain, we made the Indian the first week of November, the Pilgrim boy/girl the second week of November, and this week, students are working on a turkey.

Indian (body is made from a small lunch sack and each lunch sack will make two):

Pilgrim boy/girl:

Paper plate turkey:
This would look really cute painted and if I did this whole group, we would paint them.  Since it is a center, we don't have time for paint to dry.

I loved the writing that Mrs. Carroll did with her class at The First Grade Parade so I had to do it with my class. 
The students had to write:  I have a ____ but a pilgrim boy/girl did not.  They really turned out cute.

Then one of my wonderful coworkers found a cute turkey activity on Pinterest so we did this little art project for homework.
(we sent a feather home with each child and they were told to decorate it any way that they wanted and then we placed them on our class turkey)

Native American Homes

Are you familiar with these books?

I love to use some of these drawing lessons with

themes we are studying. 

I used the "Draw Write Now Book 3" to incorporate lessons

 on Native American Homes.

We have been learning about the different types of homes that Native Americans lived in, focusing on those that lived in North America.  (Most of my first graders thought Native Americans only lived in tepees because that is what they are familiar with.)

We learned that Plains Indians lived in tepees.

 Indians of the Northwest Coast lived in plank houses.

 Indians of the Southwest lived in adobe houses.

Woodland Indians lived in longhouses.

By the way, there is a great video on United Streaming that actually takes you on a tour inside a longhouse.

And Indians of the Southeast lived in wigwams.

(And even though this picture was saved on my computer in the upright position, everytime I uploaded it to my blog, it turned it sideways.  Sorry - don't know what I'm doing wrong.  The others worked just fine. GRRRRR)

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