New Product on TpT: Implementing the Common Core with Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Wednesday, July 6, 2016

We just finished uploading our latest lesson plan to our Teachers Pay Teachers store.  It is a great bundle of three lesson plans using the folktale Goldilocks and the Three Bears.  We used these lesson plans as part of the process in getting ready for our evaluation this past school year.  It went along with our unit on tales.  The students enjoyed all the activities and were successful with them. 

Soon we will put up our Lon Po Po lesson plans, which mirror the above plans.  Both of these lesson plans focused on character motivation and distinguishing a character's perspective from our own perspective.  These concepts, from the Common Core State Standards, are very challenging for third-grade students and cannot be mastered after one lesson.

Kim and Anne

More Wump World

Sunday, July 2, 2016

We really got "a good bang for our buck" using this book. Along with our other activities, we also had the students extend the story of Wump World. This is one the requirements of the Common Core Narrative piece.

To begin their story, the students needed to use information from the original text to describe the characters, and to write their exposition to the extended story. From there they had to decide whose point of view they were going to choose, either the Wumps' or the Pollutians'.

To help the students with their writing, we gave them guidelines to follow. To extend the story from the Wump's point of view, these were the guidelines:

*Include how the Wumps cleaned up their environment

*Include what the Wumps did to prevent this from happening again

*Include how they planned to protect their world

*Include how the Wumps' attitude changed

The guidelines for the Pollutians' point of view were:

*Include a new setting- describe where it is (name), what it looks like, sounds like, smells, like, and who lives there

*Reintroduce the Pollutians and give some background on them

*Introduce the new characters living on the planet- describe what they look like, and how they act

*Tell what the Pollutians try to do, and the problems they create

*Create a new way for the main characters to deal with the Pollutians, and how they stop them.

*Have a solution or resolution

*Do the Pollutians learn a lesson?

*Have the main characters helped the Pollutians change their perceptions?

*Did the Pollutians now see what damage they have caused everywhere they have been?

Below are some of the finished products from the students. They did an amazing job, and we are so proud of them. Feel free to try this with your students because it was fun and rewarding for both the students and for us.

Students illustrated the summary of their extended story on a six-piece summary wheel.

Happy Fourth of July!

Kim and Anne

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

February 26, 2016

This week, we reviewed nouns and verbs to get ready to write our cinquain poems. We wrote them about our favorite fairy tale or folktale character from our shared reading and read aloud books. Then the kids made their characters out of construction paper.  We loved this project, because the characters look so cute hanging on our boards, and the kids had fun making them.

Our students are becoming so successful with identifying and writing about the theme and the lesson of a story. We have spent a lot of time getting evidence from the text to support our ideas and thoughts about a story, so when it came time to find evidence to support the theme and lesson of The Rough Face Girl, our students were able to manage this task. They were able to decipher which events in the tale best matched the lesson.

Throughout the fairy tale unit, we have talked to our students about symbolism. They love identifying the symbols in stories, and now whenever they see something that is red or dark, they immediately think it is a symbol of danger. In The Rough Face Girl, we identified the theme as humbleness. To go along our writing, we decided to create a symbol that represented this theme, as well as the protagonist of the story. We came up with a heart. We know the illustrations of a story can give us lots of information, so we wanted our students to look closely at the illustrations in this book and find ones that represented the protagonist's humbleness. They then drew those illustrations on their heart.

Have a great weekend!  It is supposed to be close to 55 degrees here in Lombard! Yea!!!

Kim and Anne

Friday, February 5, 2016

Hi Everyone,
Sorry we've been gone for so long.  We've been doing lots of activities with tales, character motivation, character perspective and theme.  It has been really exciting to see the students grow in their reading after participating in this unit.  Next week we are going to make characters from different folk tales, fables, and fairy tales and write diamonte poems about them.  Hopefully we will be able to share them with you next week.

Have a great weekend.

Kim and Anne