All Things Reindeer

We have been as busy as Santa's elves here in 1st Grade the past couple of weeks!  I apologize ahead of time for the long post, but we have so much to share with you!

While learning what animals do to prepare for the winter months we read several books about hibernation, migration, and adaptation.  Of course, everyone was very exited to learn all about reindeer at this time of year!  First, we brainstormed all of  things we knew about reindeer.  Then, after reading Remarkable Reindeer by J. Bauer, and after watching some videos showing reindeer herding, migration, and reindeer races, we checked our list and added more facts.  Students used this list to aid in writing facts about reindeer complete with an illustration.

We also read a delightful story about Santa trying to find the perfect animal to pull his sleigh titled Who Will Guide My Sleigh Tonight?   He tries everything from kangaroos to butterflies.  After listening to the story, students wrote about the animal they would choose to pull their sleigh.  Here are some examples:

Next, we spent several days learning about "circle stories" by reading and discussing books by Laura Numeroff such as: If You Give a Dog a Donut, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, and If You Give a Cat a Cupcake, and If You Take a Mouse to School.
         


We had a day of activity around another Numeroff circle story    "If You Take a Mouse to the Movies."  Students enjoyed creating their own mice to attach to a  written response to the question:  "What would you want if you went to the movies?"  Thanks to Mrs. Carroll at The First Grade Parade for the wonderful ideas!

We also created a "filmstrip" version of this story:

In math we decorated a Christmas tree with addition and subtraction facts on popcorn garlands using fact families:

We also completed a word family word sort activity:

Then, thanks to a great idea from Sarah Cooley over at First Grader At Last, we created some cute reindeer and wrote our own version of "If You Give a Reindeer Some Rootbeer" and made some cute reindeer.

Here is our story:

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In math we created reindeer and Christmas trees using 2-D shapes.

We hope you enjoyed looking at all of our reindeer things!