December Mentor Sentences and a Grinch Freebie!

December is officially here! I have always had a love hate relationship with this time of year. I love all of the holiday festivities but, I was often exhausted by having to make sure my classroom management was top notch. This was in order to keep my kiddos focused on academic tasks without squelching the holiday cheer. Enter my December mentor sentences! By doing these in my classroom my students were able to stay focused on the routine of mentor sentences and participate in some holiday stories and activities. With these particular units I focus on the skill of beginning middle and end and enter into some basic primary writing. In Florida, by the end of the year in Kindergarten, our students needed to write four sentences using the key words: first, next, last, and I felt. I found that by focusing so heavily on the sequence of events in a story it helped my students work up to this writing task. As always each of the mentor sentence units are sold individually from our TPT store or they can be purchased in a bundle unit.

Click here for the Bear Stays Up for Christmas Mentor Sentence Unit.

Click Here for the Gingerbread Baby Mentor Sentence Unit.

Click Here for the Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins Mentor Sentence Unit

Click Here for The Polar Express Mentor Sentence Unit. The holidays just wouldn't be the same without one particular green Grinch! So Click here for your Grinch mentor sentence freebie. If you like this freebie then check out my Grinch mini writing unit and craft by clicking here!
Below are a few pictures of the craft in this unit, my anchor charts and some student writing samples.

Thanksgiving Freebies!

Thanksgiving is officially one week away! Here are a few primary aged Thanksgiving freebies to make these last few days a little more manageable. In recent postings I have mentioned the success that I have had in my classroom using mentor sentences. My students always love the Bear Book Series and here is a mentor sentence freebie to go along with the book: Bear Says Thanks. If you like this freebie then be sure to check out our other mentor sentence units in our TPT store.

Click here to grab your thanksgiving freebie! Each year I always had a thanksgiving feast in my classroom or school. Here are the letters my team created for these events.

 There are two different versions one for a kindergarten classroom and one that could be used for any age group. Click here to grab this letter to use for your classroom or add to your files for next year! We also had our students make their own Native American Costumes. Click here to grab a copy of this letter as well. Happy Thanksgiving!

Regions of the United States

For those of you who teach in the upper elementary grades chances are you will have to teach tall tales and the regions of the United States. Today's posting is going to be centered on how I (Susanne) have integrated these two standards and how I have implemented them into my classroom. Regions is an important part of the third grade Florida Social Studies standards. The United States is broken down into five major regions: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, West, and Southwest. In Florida, our students are responsible for knowing the states within each region. In order to effectively teach this in my classroom, I created a unit that broke down the states into each region. Click here to purchase your copy.

I found it much easier to teach one region at a time. When we began studying a particular region I would send home a study guide on Monday so they could learn the placement and spelling of each state within that region.

On Friday of that week, I would test the students on the states (spelling and location) in that region. Where the study guide breaks the states apart, the final test puts the states back into the context of a US map. To enrich the learning further, I created some close reads for each of the regions.

Click here to grab these as well. These would expose the students to the natural resources, climate, landmarks within that region.

The Florida ELA standards also include various legends and tall tales. To integrate this standard with the regions standard I would incorporate a regional tale within each section. This way the students could see that the tales were centered within the folklore of the region at that time. My favorite resource for this is The National Geographic Reading Expedition American Folktales Series.
 

November Primary Mentor Sentences

For those of you who have been using mentor sentences in your classroom or wish to start using them I have uploaded some new units for November. These include:

  Click Here For Stone Soup

  Click Here for Arrow to the Sun

 Click Here for Turkey Trouble

Click Here for The Pilgrims' First Thanksgiving 

Click Here  to grab all of these units in one bundled set! 

Now November wouldn't be complete without Veteran's Day. Click Here to grab my Veteran's Day Mentor Sentence unit.

This unit can be used independently but it would go along nicely with my Veteran's Day mini unit.

Click here  to check out this unit as well. 

If you want more information about how to incorporate these units into your daily instruction click here to check out my original mentor sentence posting.

Lastly,  this November would not be complete without an election day unit. What better than Duck for President!

Click here for this unit. For those of you who are making your own classroom units I had this graphics bundle specifically created for this unit.

Click here to add these graphics into your graphics library. Honestly, after the way this election has gone Duck might not be a bad option!

November...Thanksgiving...Primary Writing Here We Come!

It amazes me to think that it almost November! Oh, how the time flies once you hit October. At the end of September I wrote about how I got my kindergarteners to love writing by creating a Halloween Writing book. If you are just catching on to our blog then you can read about how I implemented my Halloween Writing Project and created a classroom of writers by clicking here. Since I received such positive feedback from my students about writing through the month of October, I had to figure out how I could keep this momentum going. Alas the Thanksgiving Poem Writing Project was born. This project was created with two goals in mind: first, continue this writing progress and second, sneak in a way to teach my students about the first Thanksgiving on a daily basis. To me, November always seems to be a month that if you don't plan it correctly it just sails by and I am always afraid that I will leave something out. Just like the Halloween book we go through one page a day.

This allows me to model my expectations for writing and illustrating. I also can then take the time to explain the historical event on that page. I have found that my students really enjoy the repetition of the poem and also look forward to what new fact the daily page is going to present to them. I always start this project right after Halloween because it helps to get my students off of the sugar rush and looking forward to the next holiday.

I have added in two different versions of the cover just in case you have a student who does not celebrate Thanksgiving.

If you want to continue to the writing momentum or just add in a fun holiday writing activity then click here to grab your copy.

For those of you who are wanting something a little more advanced I used this same project when I taught first grade only my students had to write the entire poem not just the second part as seen in the slide above. This was great because I used it for morning work and as a way to reinforce penmanship. Click here for the first and/or second grade version. For third and fourth grade students I (Susanne) have used this to teach and practice cursive writing. I found that even though I had older students they still got a great deal of enjoyment out of not only practicing their cursive but also participating in an educational holiday project which can easily fall by the wayside in the upper grades. Click here for the cursive version of this project. Happy November Writing!

Witches Brew and a Halloween Safety Freebie!

I love Halloween! It has always been one of my favorite things to teach about or celebrate in my classroom. I love how excited my students get and as I mentioned in a previous posting, it is a great thing to anchor writing too! Click Here to read more about how to encourage writing in your classroom with a Halloween twist! Another thing that I liked to incorporate into my classroom was Buddy Classes. Each year I would pair up my Kindergarten or First Grade class with a Third or Fourth Grade class. We would then try to develop monthly lessons (usually themed around a holiday) where the students could work together to complete an activity. This worked great because the older students would help out the younger ones and the teachers could then just wander and supervise. Plus it was a great learning experience for both classes. This Withes Brew Project is what we would do for our October buddy lesson.

We would print enough mats for each student to have one and laminate them for future use. We would assign a grade level a particular number mat and print the corresponding record sheet for that mat. For example: all kindergarten students would have mat number one and all third grade students would have mat number two. We would ask  parents to donate supplies for our project by sending home the following letters (which are included in the unit).

By sending the follow up note we eliminated the possibility of ending up with 50 bags of candy corn and nothing else. Once we got all the students together (usually on Halloween if it fell on a school day) we would recite the poem while mixing the ingredients (its really fun to do this in a dollar store caldron) and then pass everything out and let the buddies start working. Once the students were finished and their papers were checked they could eat their witches brew! This activity could also be done as an independent class if you had some parent volunteers. You can grab this fun unit by clicking here.

Now for the Halloween Safety Freebie! I always spend sometime talking about the importance of Halloween Safety with my classes. It was always very difficult to come up with enough Social Studies grades so my team developed this Halloween Safety Test.

 Click Here to grab your free copy! Happy Halloween!

Pumpkins and Apples and a Freebie!

October just would not be the same with out some pumpkins and apples! As many teachers do, I always would spend the last week in September celebrating Johnny Appleseed's birthday and teaching all about apples. As October began, I would then use the previous lessons to dive into a unit of pumpkins. My students often found it quite exciting to compare the two fruits. If you are in need of some fun and research based lessons to teach about pumpkins and apples then check out my Pumpkins and Apple Unit by clicking here.

This unit is designed with fall in mind. It is a great unit to explore apples and then compare them to pumpkins. It has a venn-diagram comparing the two, a printable to explore and learn how to describe the inside and outside of an apple and of a pumpkin, a pumpkin and apple comparison through investigation activity, inside a pumpkin craft, pumpkin vocabulary cards and assessment, how to carve a pumpkin sequencing and procedural writing activity, and The Great Pumpkin writing activity and craft. Check out the samples below!

For those of you who are starting to plan for Red Ribbon Week here is a fun graphic freebie. Click Here to grab your free graphics!