Happy New Year, everyone! Hopefully you had a wonderfully relaxing holiday spent just the way you envisioned it for yourself. Anne and I just wanted to share a few things we are going to do with our students on Tuesday.
The Curriculum Corner has January Welcome messages that are great to warm-up those brains when the students walk into the classroom.
They also have cool Did You Know? January discussion cards. They are great to read and discuss as we line up to go home.
Anne and I found this Jack Prelutsky poem years ago and have been using it ever since. We have the students read it and then work with a partner to answer questions. This year I tweaked the questions a bit. To get everyone in a celebratory mood, we buy New Year's Eve hats for the kids wear as they work.
Reading Squirrel's New Year's Resolution by Pat Miller was something we started last year. This adorable story gives students a very tangible idea of what it means to have a New Year's resolution.
A new read aloud for us is One Word From Sophia by Jim Averback. The story goes perfectly with one-word goal writing project we will do with our students.
We are combining two "one-word" ideas. The first one comes from Thinker Builder. It is called What's Your Word? We will use the first page of his activity because it is a planning and brainstorming sheet.
The writing project will come from One Little Word by Lindsay Flood. In her activity, the students write their word, explain why they chose the word and write one way they will accomplish the goal in their personal life and one way they will accomplish their goal in their academic life. Lastly, the student draw a picture of themselves trying to accomplish the goal. We love that this inspires the students to visualize themselves meeting their goal. Start with the end in mind, right? Habit #2 will be discussed a lot during this lesson. A cute twist on this idea is that Lindsay has the students write hashtag synonyms of their goal word.
Here is my example.
Call me crazy, but if we have time, I thought I would have the kids watch one of the videos on making New Year's stars to decorate our bulletin board where these One-Word goals will be posted.
Anne and I did spend time revising lessons and putting them in our Teachers Pay Teachers store.
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| Here's the link if you're interested in taking a peek. |
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| Our link! |
Lon Po Po is one of our favorite tales. It connects with so many of our social studies and reading topics. Our goal was to tap into students' creative and divergent thinking. The activities very much do that, but the stand out is the interview the students write to portray the various perspectives of the wolf, the protagonist, and the reader. They then record the interview in a podcast and publish it. So fun!!!!
We wish everyone an exciting week back at school. We cannot wait to see the kids and hear all about their time off. Then, we can hit the ground running with fun learning and social emotional activities.
Kim and Anne
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