We have adopted Journeys Reading this year and part of Unit 2 is using the book From Seed to Pumpkin by Wendy Pfeffer. YAY, a "REAL" book! We were given a class set of the book so we will be taking a small break for our weekly reading stories to focus on this book. We have some fun activities planned and I am so excited to take a break from our normal reading routine. 

I have been working on creating this new little packet to help. Note: This is NOT a Journeys packet so if you don't have Journeys you will LOVE it! 

We are going to start with an Anticipation Guide. I love hooking the kids right away and getting a brief look into what they already know and what misconceptions we may need to address. My kids love Anticipation Guides because they compete for the best score! :) 

We are then going to work on this little Pumpkin Life Cycle Book. I included pages for seed, sprout, vine, flower, green pumpkin and orange pumpkin. 

I also have included several graphic organizers, writing templates, vocab activitiy, ABC Order, Pumpkin Parts, Sentence Shuffle and a fun Pumpkin Investigation activity.

I had to get his Giant Pumpkin Puzzle from Oriental Trading. It was cheap and will make a FUN October/November Bulletin Board. 

We are going to finish our Pumpkin Unit by making these cute little waterbottle pumpkins! 

My daughter and I made this little guy today, SO CUTE and so simple with very little materials needed. Here are the steps if you are interested in making this with you kiddos. 

 

After pumpkins we are on to OWLS! I ordered my Owl Pellets today! 

I LOVE FALL! 

Owl Pellet Fun!

Wow! The finale of our Owl Unit was owl pellet dissection. What an amazing time we had with our owl pellets this morning! Here are a few pictures. 

This is a picture of the kit that I had ready for each group. Each kit contained: tweezers, dissection sticks, gloves, ruler, one pellet, Dissection Form, magnifying glass and diagrams of various animals so students could identify which animal their owl ate.

 Here you can see me little investigators comparing their bones to the diagram.

 I had several mom helpers so there were only 3-4 kids/group.

We had the most amazing time, the kids LOVED it and really saw themselves as little scientists. The pellets were great, most kids had at least 2 skulls in each pellet! I highly recommend obdk.com (and I am not a paid sponsor, I promise).

As promised last week, I have combined all the activities from the 7-day Giveaway Event into one packet and just posted in to TpT. Click here to check it out! It is 50 pages of Owl fun! Whew! 

Activities Included:

-Anticipation Guide for “Owls” by Gail Gibbons

-Owl Vocabulary Book, Game Cards, Word Search and ABC Order 

-10 Page Math Journal

-Pellet Dissection Information and Recording Sheet

-2 Thinking Maps and Writing Pages

-Fact and Opinion Sorting Activity and Anchor Charts

-Guess Whooo??? Owl Craftivity

Stay tuned because in the month of December we will do it all again. I am still undecided on the theme of the next Giveaway Event but check back, I will let you know. 

WHOOOO Loves A Freebie? - Day 1

Happy Monday everyone! Whoooo LOVES a FREEBIE?!

In November I have two major units of study that I like to complete with my students: Owls and Pilgrims. Before we get to our "Story of the Pilgrims" Unit I want to spend a little time learning about owls. This weekend I had the pleasure of sitting in a full day professional development class in which we learned about choosing exemplar text. (I hope you sense the sarcasm about PD on a Saturday, I was NOT happy) But, trying to make the best of a crummy situation, I am going to try to apply what I learned yesterday to my classroom. When I think of exemplar text, the author that sticks out most in my mind is Gail Gibbons. Her books have great visuals they are full of factual information and great for guided read-aloud lessons. 

 I decided to start our Owl unit tomorrow with a Anticipation Guide for the book Owls by Gail Gibbons.

I love using Anticipation Guides because the my kiddos become so much more involved in the text trying to listen to hear the answers to determine if their thinking before reading was correct or not. Anticipation Guides are great at activating prior knowledge and building curiosity about new units of study. Maybe it is just my class, but my kids can sometimes get slightly competitive with the amount of answers that they got correct.
  

Because I am so happy it is fall, and because I am loving this new unit I think we should have a little freebie fun! For the next 7 days I will upload one new item/day from our Owl study for FREE - but I will only post it for free for 24 hours. You must stop by daily to grab your free item. At the end of the week, I will put all the items in a packet on TpT. HINT: become a follower of my TpT store you will be notified each day as I post the freebie.

SEE YOU TOMORROW! 

One last note...the finale of this owl unit in my classroom will be to dissect owl pellets at the beginning of next week. I ordered owl pellets from www.obdk.com. I ordered one pellet/three kids and have scheduled several parents to come and help. The pellets were very affordable and arrived very quickly!