ELA RAMBLE: Snowmen at Night

I cannot believe six months have gone by since I last posted ... this year has slipped away in front of my eyes! Now that we are well on our way in the last half of the school year, I figured I was MORE than ready to get back into the swing of things on the blog!

At my school, my grade-level is currently writing our own ELA Curriculum. Although this is time-consuming, exhausting, treacherous, a lot of work, I know it will pay off to have a curriculum filled with meaningful texts and lessons that we are actually excited about teaching. We just have to get through this year of writing it all. ;)

We decided to assign a monthly theme so that we could stay focused on a topic that correlated to either science or social studies standards, and could also lend itself towards some high-quality mentor texts for writing.

This month, we decided to do a Snow/Winter Unit to tie-in some of the science standards (types of matter, water cycle, etc). It makes sense to do a winter unit in upstate New York, where there is PLENTY of real-life snow examples! ;) Our central mentor texts for the month include: Brave Irene by William Steig (also available online at: www.storylineonline.net), Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, The Biggest, Best Snowman by Margery Cuyler, and It's Snowing! by Gail Gibbons.

After focusing heavily on sequencing and transition words in our writing {first, then, next, last}, we read the story Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner. These snowmen books are a-dorable, and my kiddos totally eat them up! They love trying to find the pickle on every page. Leave it to seven year olds ... :)

After reading the story, I had my students brainstorm what THEY would do if they were snowmen at night. What wild adventures would they go on?! They were encouraged to be as creative as they wanted. This original idea was from Cara at The First Grade Parade aka: My inspiration in life.

They came out super cute and have made an awesome hallway display! Plus, you've gotta love a snowy display in New York. This can stay out until April, if I'm really feeling lazy!!!

I just love the way the torn-paper snowmen came out! SO stinkin' cute. Will definitely repeat this one next year!

We are working on wrapping up a couple of our Persuasive Writing Pieces + Projects now, so stay tuned for a post on that SOON! :) 

Happy Crafting!

- Kristen