Weather Idioms

Monday, June 27, 2016

Hi everyone! Check out our free weather idioms at our Teacher's Pay Teacher's store!

Wump World Part 2

June 26, 2016
We are back to share two more of our activities that related to our study of natural resources and Wump World. One is a literacy activity, and one is a hands-on social studies activity.

We spent a lot of time throughout the year identifying the theme and author's message of various stories. The kids have become quite confident in picking out one or two words that relay the theme of the story, and then using that word or words to generate a sentence that is specific to the author's message of the story. We had our students do this after we finished reading Wump World. Some of the words they generated for the theme were respect, caring, and kindness. When we took a closer look, we wanted to decide which of these words was the best one to represent the theme of Wump World. That word was respect. Students then wrote their sentence of how respect or lack of respect was portrayed in the story. They also had to find the best evidence in the story to support their sentence. After that hard work, the students created a water color scene to go along with their picture. This whole activity was fun, but was still a challenge for the students, even in April.

We always like to sprinkle in hands-on activities to go with our social studies units. We found an exciting, hands-on activity to go along with the nonrenewable resource--fossil fuels. It was all about respecting our earth while we dig for fossil fuels that we need to make our everyday lives more comfortable. The activity came from a natural resource unit written by teachers from Texas. It was called, "Cookie Mining." You can find the activity if you download the packet from the link. It was an effective way to help students understand the necessity for preserving the land while digging for fossil fuels. Reading Wump World first helped make this activity more meaningful and effective.

Hope you are enjoying your summer. We will be back next week with some of our final activities from this unit!

Kim and Anne

Wump World Part One

June 17, 2016

Happy Summer! We hope all is well with everyone. We are so excited to blog about some of the fun, thematic activities we did during our last trimester of school.

Right after our water and weather unit, we rolled right into renewable and non-renewable natural resources in social studies. We paired the fiction text of Wump World by Bill Peet with nonfiction resources online to start this unit.

We learned the definition of renewable and non-renewable resources from the Encyclopedia Brittanica site for kids. We took notes on the information, and then organized the notes into a web.

The students loved using Kidspiration to create a graphic organizer of their notes on natural resources.

After this, our kids had a great time connecting what they had learned from our reading of this text, as well as prior nonfiction reading from our water unit to the fiction text of Wump World. The emotions ran deep. They were appalled at what the Pollutians did to to Wump World, and could easily make the connection to what humans are doing to our planet now. They immediately saw that the Pollutians symbolized the humans. It was nice to see them make that connection as well. 

With this text, we wanted to give the students a challenge to take the skill of cause and effect to the next level. Instead of providing them with either the cause or the effect, and having them identify the missing element, we had them identify both the cause and the effects in the story. What was great about this, is that they soon realized that one cause could have multiple effects in the story. 

This student looked through Wump World and found an effect.  Then he looked for the cause.

These are just a few things that we did with this unit. Next week, we will share more…Wump World Part 2.

Kim and Anne