Penguins and Polar Bears!

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It's been a while!  Sorry about that!  This has been one of those years that I'm just on my toes, running around and working like a dog!  Thanks for hanging around this little blog and not giving up on me!  We've been working so hard!  We started daily 5 but we are taking it very slow.  One of the lessons in the book might take me 3 days to get through.  But, we are up to 6 minutes of reading to self and 8 minutes of reading to someone.  Not to mention that my students groan on the days that I tell them we aren't doing daily 5!

We have also been working very hard on our writing!  We read all of the Tacky the Penguin books that I could get my hands on, then we wrote about Tacky.













My bulletin board could have used a title, but reality shows that I am not the bulletin board queen.  Sorry!

After writing about Tacky we starting our non-fiction penguin study.  Next year I think I'll do Non-fiction first, I think it might flow better.  But this way worked fine too.  I used a tree map with the kids but I can't find it anywhere (otherwise I would share)!

This past week we learned about Polar Bears!  We brainstormed our schema on a circle map.  Then we used a tree map to organize our thoughts.  After that we wrote our "reports" and even made covers for them.  We celebrated by watching the movie Arctic Tale.  The kids loved it so much.  So, next week we will be learning about walruses (because they were so cute in the movie and Deana Jump has the most adorable unit that I should have bought before I taught polar bears)!

I love how this little boy wrote "I love polar bears because"!  Almost my whole class can spell the word because, because we use it everyday when we write to our star student!

Here are the thinking maps!
Polar Bear Circle Map
Polar Bear Tree Map