A whole post dedicated to November

November 20, 2013 by Kristen 9 Comments

I don't know about you, but these germs my little kiddos are bringing me are wrecking havoc on my poor immune system. My month started with all of these goodies. Then included 2 rounds of antibiotics. What to do???

To start each month off, I always send home a family art project. It gets the kiddos thinking about the upcoming month and gives families time to spend together doing something fun and creative. You can read about this project here!

Grab it in my TPT store

Next up, decorating our class door.

I have a lot of kiddos who come to school early. I grabbed a few of them and let them help create our

turkey-themed door.

I quickly sketched the outline of a turkey body. See the colorful handprint, those are the feathers!

I chose students who were on task and making good choices to paint the turkey's body. When the paint was dry, each table group came up and chose a feather to write their name on in a sharpie. Easy peasy!!! It's hung up on our door with a glue gun because it's the only thing that will hold!

My students were so engaged when we learned about Veteran's Day. You can see the entire lesson in an earlier post! It also includes a wonderful Heroes pack from another great blogger!

My kiddos absolutely love P.E., especially when I play handball with them!

For one of our center activities, students created a turkey. On the feathers, they wrote the things they were thankful for. Then, they hung it up on their “Memory Book.” Love these memory books because they display student work and at the end of the year, I'm no scrambling putting them together. Just make a cute cover and fold the prongs. Done and done!!!

Teaching a combo class can be tricky. While I was teaching a grammar lesson to my second graders, my first graders {just 6 of them} found photos in magazines and created their own circle maps. They loved presenting them to the second graders using our brand new document camera. Woo hoo PTA!

One of our standards in Social Studies for 1st and 2nd grade is comparing things from long ago and today and observing change over time. My students loved this G.L.A.D. pictorial of Pilgrims and children today. We completed the middle part yesterday for the Native Americans.

We also created another G.L.A.D. pictorial of the Mayflower. My students loved it!

Have you gone on Scholastic's site??? So many amazing videos. I even included the link on my student's homework as one of their assignments.

If you aren't familiar with Katie King at Queen of First Grade Jungle, she creates amazing monthly no prep activities. I use them for our literacy and math centers. So engaging, fun, and easy for me! Plus, the kids love them. The outline of the activities are similar from month-to-month so your kiddos know the routine, which saves you valuable time! One of her writing activities had the children write what they learned about Pilgrims and Native Americans.

Here is the Pilgrim samples. Students chose if they wanted to be a Pilgrim or Native American.

Students used a face template and chose the color skin that matched. They glued on hair from construction paper. I've used yarn in the past but didn't have any, and they still turned out super cute! They traced their hands and glued them onto the upper body. Then, students glued their writing onto the body. There were 3 different writing options for different abilities. Finally, students glued on their “bonnet.” However, I noticed that it looks more like a yamika. I'll need to fix it for next year.

They used this tree map from our mini-lessons to write about the Pilgrims.

We finished our Native Americans today but I completely spaced and didn't take any photos. Check back tomorrow.

Here is a sample of my homework for one of the weeks. It was a short week so instead of assigning spelling from our Word Study program, I assigned activities that went along with our unit of study in Social Studies. They loved it!

The math section gets filled out by my kiddos when I forget to fill it in…oops!

For the remainder of the week, students are finishing their Native American writing and art, creating a place mat with cornucopia art and “I am Thankful” writing, and that's about it. I'll blog about that at the end of the week. They turned out so cute!

I can't believe we have just a few more days until break, then it's time to move onto holiday celebrations around the world. Seriously loving this time of year!

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