Excited about Research!

I showed you some pics yesterday of our first few days of research.  I'm back to show you what we did today.  We added the circle map page today and my firsties are searching for more facts through all the animal books.  We have had several parents send in color photos of animals and I put them in their book baskets so they could look at them while searching through books.  Toward the end of our unit I will divide them up between the kiddos to put with their projects.  

Look at these two sweeties sharing their moose book to write down facts.  Melts my heart!

Look at all this - I AbSoLuTeLy love all this research.  They are working so hard and they LOVE every minute of it.  They are completely engaged!

We also added the fill-in-the-blank page yesterday.  They had to look through their fact sheets from my unit to find the correct words.

I hope your last few weeks are as successful as ours!  Have a great rest of the week!

Getting Our Research On!

We started our research this week!  My firsties are doing Woodland Animals.  The eight animals in my unit are bear, skunk, raccoon, deer, squirrel, owl, moose, and fox.  I have 3 extra animals that some of my students decided to do; wolf, chipmunk and rabbit.  We started off by talking about our vocabulary words for the unit:

(I am also adding "predator and prey" as soon as I get them laminated.)

Here's what our animal baskets look like:

I got about 54 books from our school library and about 30 from the public library.  Not to mention all the books I already have.  I LOVE that there are tons of books available for them to do their research!

 Here's all the books about multiple animals.  The students know how to use the table of contents and index to see if their animal is in each book.  If not, they look at a different book.  Right now they are looking these books and writing down any facts they find that is not already in my woodland animal unit.

I gave each student 2 copies of their animal from the posters in my unit.  They colored both and then we hung them back to back to decorate the room.

They are keeping all their pages and facts inside a folder so everything is right there together.  We only do a page or two a day.  We just started so they only have their fact sheets inside.  We added the "fill in the blank" page today.  I"ll hopefully get more pics up later to show you.

I hope to take more pics along the way and show you little by little what we're doing.  It takes several weeks but slow and steady wins the race - right!?!?!

Have a great week!

Rainforest Animals Shared Research and Writing Project

As promised....I finally finished my Rainforest Animals Shared Research and Writing Project! Yeah!!!!  This is the last one I needed to complete our units for my first grade team at my school.  (We start these Monday btw! Eeeeeek!)  

I have included all the pages that go along with the Jaguar for you to preview.  The pages are the same for each of the other 7 animals.

Here are all the first grade standards this unit covers:

If you have already purchased or even viewed my other Shared Research and Writing Projects, this one is similar.  Here are the others in case you're interested.

     

     

We will be starting our Woodland Animals unit next week.  I always start by doing a study of nonfiction text features.  Hopefully I'll be back soon with pics and more info for you.

Thanks for stopping by!

Have a GREAT weekend!

Finishing Plants ... and Adjectives! (and a little freebie)

We finished up our study of plants last week.  This is my science bulletin board that I switch out for new units.

I have been using this super cute craftivity for a couple of years now.

It's from Made for First Grade.  Click on the picture to check it out.

We labeled a plant and then created a "Need, Have, Are" chart together.

We've been talking about Adjectives the last few weeks so I gave each kiddo a sticky and let them write down an adjective and we added it to our plant.

Speaking of adjectives....

I threw together a little mini unit for adjectives.  Adjective always seem to be so hard for my firsties so I wanted to try and make it a little more fun for them.  I wrote some "plain, old, boring" sentences on our chart paper.  (You could use sentence strips if you wanted to)  Then I printed some adjectives on card-stock and then glued them to popsicle sticks.  They have to "blindly" pull out a stick and read the sentence with their adjectives.  

We did this little activity each day for practice.  Each day I had them write a sentence they made in their journal and then they'd have to illustrate it.  The seemed to really enjoy this.  It was funny to see some of their drawings.

Feel free to click on any of the adjective pics above to grab my mini unit for free.  :)

If you do download it, please show me a little "comment-love" :)

We begin our Shared Research and Writing Projects next week and I can't wait.  We had a total blast with our research last year and I'm excited to see my firsties "dive in" this year too!

My class will be doing the

Woodland Animals

My other team mates will be doing

Safari

Ocean

Polar

and The Rain forest that I am feverishly trying to finish by next week.  I'll get it posted as soon as I finish. 

Each of our first grade teachers do a different set of animals.  We share our books with each other and we work on them for about a month.  At the end of school, we have a "Writing Project" night for our parents.  They are able to walk through all our rooms to see their writing and art projects for the animal they chose.  I will post more about this as we go along.  If you would like to see our Writing Night from last year, 

click here. 

Have a great rest of the week!

Plants!

I love spring time in the classroom!  We've been talking about plants this week.  I always have tons of books to read and we learn all about the life cycle of sunflowers and bean plants.

Here are a few pics of some of our centers this week:

Fact Families

Recording sheet to match:

 Life Cycle Sequencing

Recording sheet to match:

 Parts of a Plant

Parts of a plant and Labeling

 After they put together the pieces they have to draw and label their own.

These are just a few pics from our plant unit.  There are also some writing pages included.  I hope to show you some more pics soon.  If you would like to check it out just click on the pic below.

Happy Spring!