Five Little Owls

We made this book as a class. It is called Five Little Owls. We made this book as part of our Little Owl's Night  literature unit.

Advent

We made these cute advent wreaths last week to help us prepare for Jesus' birth. The kids made fingerprint holly berries on their wreaths.

At our religion center we have advent candles that we light during prayer time each morning. When we light the candles, we sing the song Light One Candle. Here is the first verse:

Light one candle for hope.

One bright candle for hope.

He brings hope to every heart, 

He comes! He comes!

Below is a picture of our classroom religion center. I change the table cloth for the different liturgical seasons; right now the table cloth is purple because we are in the season of Advent.

We also have an advent calendar. We open a new door each day during calendar time.

We also have an Advent chain. Each link has a name that Jesus is called in the Bible such as The Good Shepherd, Savior, Prince of Peace, etc... We remove one link each day and I ask the kids to tell me some of the names of Jesus that were on previous links.

Our Christmas play is coming up in a few days. Look for the post about our play soon. 

Literature Study: Little Owl's Night

We just completed our second literature study. We read the book Little Owl's Night by Divya Srinivasan. I created some activities for the students to do that correlated to the book and the standards that I teach.  After we read the book, we did the following activities: 

Art:
We made Little Owl out of construction paper.

Science:
Since the book takes place at night, we talked about the night sky and stars. We made this big dipper project. First, the students used water colors to paint the sky on a sheet of white paper. Next, I drew dots to show where the kids should place their star stickers. Then, the kids placed their star stickers on the dots I drew. Finally, the kids connected the dots with a pencil.

We also talked about parts of an owl and made this owl craft. After we made the owl craft, we cut apart a strip of words and glued them onto our owls.

 Here is the pattern:

We also made a list of all the animals in the story and classified them as nocturnal or diurnal.

We made a chart about owls.

Reading:
We reread Little Owl's Night in small groups. This student is using one of our homemade pointers. 

Language Arts:
We made a list of all of the animals in the story and put them in ABC order.

Math:

We counted the animals on each page of the book and made a tally chart.

 We used the tally chart to make a bar graph.

Cooking:

We made owl cookies for our cooking lesson.

Music and Poetry:

We learned the song Great Big Stars and learned the ASL signs to the song. 

Great big stars, way up a yonder.

Great big stars, way up a yonder.

Great big stars, way up a yonder.

All around the world gonna shine, shine.

All around the world gonna shine, shine.

In the picture below, the kids are signing "big".

Here the students are signing "stars".

Here the students are signing "up".

The students are signing "all".

The students are signing "around".

The students are signing "world".

The students are signing "shine".

The students had so much fun during our literature study of Little Owl's Night!

Fall Acrostic Poems

Each year, I have the kids write acrostic poems for fall. The kids get a list of words to choose from and then they fill out a paper with pre-printed letters on it that either spell out Fall or Autumn. Here are a few of the completed poems.

Picasso

Last week we learned about Pablo Picasso in our Art Masters program. The students made these crazy abstract faces. I did a directed draw activity to show them how to make the outline of the face and then the kids added their own details. They look awesome. The kids used oil pastels on white paper. 

More Brown Bear, Brown Bear

We did a couple more activities to go with our Brown Bear Unit. We made a list of words from the book and put the words in ABC order.

We also reread the book and used cut outs of the animals to show what page we were on in the story. For example, when we read the page about the red bird, the kids who had a red bird cut out showed the rest of the group their red bird.