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.