Summer time catch -up
It is hot outside, and while I am trying to organize for a new teaching year, I am remembering all the ideas I never had time to sit down and post last year. This may take me several days and the ideas will definitely be in no specific order, but here goes. One of my favorite units that we did last year was Fairy tales and other Children Literature. I love children's literature and the different illustrators. During this special week we had Princess day, Bear story Day, Dr. Seuss day, and then sharing our own favorites day. Really this could all take a whole month, but we just touched on some highlights. Of course. Princess day had all stories about Princess'. I focused on the Princess and the pea and did many fun activities in class, like having all the children bring their old nap mats and we stacked them and did experiments to see what we could feel under all the mattresses. We decided we were all Prince and Princesses, and could feel even the smallest thing we placed under the mattress. I have done this unit before and had created a math center involving pea pods. I made foam pea pods and got pea sized pom poms for counting. We counted by 5's having 5 peas in each pod and we added peas and pods by rolling dice to see how many pods we had and then rolling dice to see how many peas we had in our pods.
On our Bear day, of course we learned about The 3 Bears, Winnie the Pooh, Teddy Bears picnic, Corduroy and several other bears, since I have a collection of old Children's literature. We made Bear puppets, went on a Bear hunt and brought our favorite snugly bear for the day. I love how every ones is so different.
We also had to follow my directions and make bears. I drew on the board and they had to copy along with each step to draw a bear. The exercise was strictly for direction following. These turned out cute as well. We talked about how many circles we used to make our bears.
I include Childrens literature throughout all my teaching units but this one just has everything totally focused on the literature of the day. I will definitely do it again. The children had a blast and I did too.
