Happy Schedulin’ Sunday! This week we are continuing our two week gingerbread unit using READ IT UP: Gingerbread Man with a focus on Gingerbread STEM lessons! We are making family Christmas gifts, celebrating Polar Express and wrapping up our report card assessments!
Lesson Plans
I am not writing lesson plans this week because I have a list of things to accomplish and we’re just going to get through the list. BUT did you know you can download all of my lesson plans from this year? Click the image to download my lesson plans!
Morning Meeting
This week our morning greeting is a new greeting that is an adaptation of our shoe greeting. Instead of finding a shoe and greeting the owner of said shoes, we’re using our slippers!
To see our shoe greeting in action, check out this video:
For more morning meeting greeting ideas, check out our Morning Meeting Greeting Resource.
For morning meeting activities, check out our Quiz Quiz Trade. You can find our Quiz Quiz Trade resource here!
Blends BOOTCAMP
This week we are continuing Blends BOOTCAMP! This week we are starting with digraph WH and we will spend all week on this digraph. We will do a digraph a week and then we move to vowels after Christmas break.
As with all components of TKS Bootcamp, we start with the circle chart. Then we will work on building and writing TH words. We will also sort TH and F words. During small groups, we’re using the Word Family Bootcamp Decodable readers to work on our decoding and blending skills! These books have been a huge hit with the kids and have really boosted their confidence in reading and writing words!
For more on Blends Bootcamp, check out the brand new TKS BOOTCAMP website!
For more blends and digraphs practice, check out our What Does The Fox Say Blends Edition!
Read It Up: Gingerbread Man
This week I am so excited to continue our two week gingerbread man unit! One reason I am excited about this is because we are using our new Read It Up creation for gingerbread man. Our Read It Up creation allows you to work on building our comprehension skills and includes Gingerbread STEM! The first week of this unit was a blast! We compared stories, created story maps, drew gingerbread men, made boats for Gingerbread STEM and ate gingerbread man cookies!
One of the main pieces of our gingerbread unit is reading various versions of the story and creating a chart to compare and contrast the stories! At the end of the week we will graph our favorite version write about our favorite version! All of these activities and resources are included in our Read It Up creation!
Here is our story map from Read It Up!
If you want to engage your students, give them some foil and a Gingerbread STEM challenge! We discussed how the gingerbread had a problem crossing the river and our solution was to build him a boat. The kids were given a piece of foil and simply told to make a boat! This Gingerbread STEM challenge was so fun and engaging and led to some great discussions about floating, sinking and weight!
This week we will be writing what we would run from if we were a gingerbread man. We brainstorm all of the things we would run from, then we write our story. To publish our writing, we make a gingerbread man!
For more gingerbread man ideas and activities, check out this post:
For more information on our Read It Up creations, check out this post:
This week we are reading these stories:
We’re also doing these fun art projects this week:
To make these elf legs, the students cut strips of paper and elf shoes. The stripes are made from glitter!
These directed drawings of Santa are from Proud To Be Primary!
These are the creations we are using in our classroom this week!
Gingerbread Man Freebies
