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!

Fire Safety Unit

As many of you are aware next week is Fire Safety week. My students have always loved learning about fire safety and it always helps that our local fire department comes to do a wonderful presentation. If you read my last posting then you know it was all about mentor sentences for the primary aged classroom. I decided this year to add a mentor sentence into my unit about Fire Safety. I love Gail Gibbons and her non-fiction text: Fire Fire. Nevertheless, my favorite mentor text for fire safety week is: Miss Mingo and the Fire Drill. I love how this text uses a fire drill as a means of teaching fire safety, especially since this is something my students can connect to. Plus, this story has cool details about animals and their different ways of expressing fear and protecting themselves...my students always get a kick out of this. So here is what my fire safety unit includes: four word of the day worksheets (two levels for each word) and posters. I love using the word of the day to expand on vocabulary.

The words are: stop, drop, roll and fire. There is also a stop, drop and roll writing activity and a smoke detector homework activity.

I have also included three different versions of the family meeting spot writing activity so you can pick the level that is most appropriate for your kiddos! There are vocabulary cards, a cute hat craft, a song, and the mentor sentence unit. 

Click Here to purchase your copy of this updated fire safety unit. You can also try out my mentor sentences by downloading my Officer Buckle and Gloria mentor sentence freebie by clicking here.

Primary Mentor Sentences

So what is a mentor sentence and why would it ever be useful in Kindergarten or First Grade? In theory it is a sentence that is taken from a mentor text that is used to model different kinds of sentence structure. Last February, we were introduced to the concept of mentor sentences during a professional development presentation. Granted the concept is geared to second, third, and fourth grade students (more to come one this later) however; I liked the idea so much I immediately started to brainstorm how I could possibly bring the idea into my classroom or even make it appropriate for my primary students. It seemed to me, that no matter how many times I went over that a sentence begins will an UPPERCASE letter and ends with a period, my kiddos still seemed to forget to do it in their own writing. I decided to focus my attention to this concept (or lack there of) using mentor sentences. Each week, I would choose a mentor text and take a sentence to focus on for the week. On day one I would read the story. Then we would look at the sentence together, we would circle the uppercase letter and period, count the words in the sentence and look for any sight words in this sentence.

 The students would then set to work on illustrating the sentence. On day two we would review the story and we would work on unscrambling the words to put them in the correct sentence order. The students would finish the day's activity by rewriting the sentence in their best handwriting.

On day three we would go over the story and sentence a third time and then the students would set to work by writing their own version of the sentence. We would start by brainstorming a list of ideas together and I would complete one example. This way, my struggling students could participate by copying the example and my more advanced students could write their own. All students were then expected to illustrate their sentence.

On day four we would review the story and sentence one last time and then the students would complete the weekly assessment. 

On day five we would review the sentence and complete the corresponding craft. I would usually display their weekly writing and craft on my bulletin boards. What I found was through the repetition of completing these mentor sentences each week, my kiddos finally started to use the proper conventions in their everyday writing. If you want to bring these into your classroom Click Here for my Officer Buckle and Gloria Mentor Sentence Freebie. You can also check out my other Mentor Sentence Units. 

Click Here For the Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything Unit

Click Here For The Very Busy Spider Unit

Click Here For the Skeleton Hiccups Unit

Click Here For the Stellaluna Unit

You can also purchase all of these October Units by Clicking Here.