Reindeer and Santa

Hello!  December is marching right along and Christmas break is in sight.  It's looking very festive outside our room as we display all of the great writing and cute things we've made.

Last week we wrote our letters to Santa and read all kinds of fun stories about him.  One of our favorites was titled "Santa's Stuck!" by Rhonda Greene.  This is a story about Santa eating too many cookies as he makes his rounds on Christmas Eve.  He gets too fat and can't get back up the chimney.  The story goes on with all sorts of animals trying to help him.  As a follow-up writing activity, the kiddos wrote their ideas for how they would get Santa out of his predicament.  We have been focusing on using transition words as a way to organize our writing, so, for this assignment, everyone used the words first, next, then, and finally and practiced using commas.  (Check out our pocket chart full of words we need when writing in narrative or explanatory style.)  Of course we just had to have a cute "craftivity" to go along with our writing.

 

For more practice with these transition words, we wrote the sequence of events Santa goes through to get all of those presents delivered on Christmas Eve all around the world.  Our mentor text for this activity was a book titled "Hurry, Santa!" by Julie Sykes.   It is chocked full of wonderful adjectives and verbs, so, we gathered these up as we read each page of the story.  The kiddos were expected to use some of these more exciting words in their writing and did a super job!

Well, we couldn't read about Santa without spending time reading and learning all about reindeer (the real kind).  Before reading many non-fiction books about reindeer, we wrote down what we knew about them.  After reading, we gathered facts from our reading, and discussed whether some of our earlier thinking was a fact or an opinion.  This is a difficult concept for first graders, but they did a great job with it!   Each student wrote down their favorite reindeer facts and created a very cute reindeer.

Don't worry! Santa's reindeer were not forgotten as we alphabetized  the names of his reindeer!

We also read a wonderful book titled "The Night Tree" by Eve Bunting and made comparisons of a character in the story to someone in our own life.  We also made many inferences along the way as we looked carefully for clues in the pictures and author's words.  We discussed how the author's words and the illustrator's pictures work together to evoke a certain mood or feeling.  The boys and girls are loving this type of close reading of the text.  We do a lot of "turn and talk" with their "elbow buddy" as we learn and discuss what great writing sounds and feels like. As a follow-up activity everyone wrote about their connection to a story character and illustrated it with pictures.

So. . .if your child comes home exhausted, you can see why!!  We are very, very busy all day long, every day!  This week it's everything "gingerbread" so be sure to check back for an update!