Early Civilizatons

What a week!!! Well, I almost logged another 60 hour week and on top of that got a fabulous little cold from one of my students!!!  However, I made it to Friday! The past two weeks, we have been learning about Early Civilizations.  In all honesty, I was terrified to teach Social Studies because I have never liked history and I know very little about it. But, I actually really enjoyed teaching about the first people who ever came to North America and my students seemed to be into it as well. The other reading teacher and I really try to integrate our reading and social studies so we read a story entitle "Sees Behind Trees". The story is about a boy who is nearly blind but is expected to shoot a bow and arrow in order to receive his new name to become a man. However, he uses his other senses such as hearing and smell and is able to do things that the other Native American boys are not able to do.  At the end of the story, he is blindfolded and is asked "what do you see?". Though he can not physically see, he uses his senses to accurately describe a man approaching from a great distance away. Therefore he earns the name "Sees Behind Trees".  Today, we made Native American necklaces and came up with our own names based on something we are good at. My name was "teaches while exhausted".  Below are some pictures of us with our necklaces!!! And yes, my students are normally this wild and crazy!

Author Study Centers

Chris Van Allsburg

This week, my students have been working on an author study with some of the best books by Chris Van Allsburg. My fellow teacher Mrs. Coleman gave me the activities that she received from another fellow teacher in the county.  My students have completed two stations and have two more to finish next week before we wrap things up with a culminating activity and a quiz on what they have learned.  We started the author study by reading "The Garden of Abdul Gasazi" which immediately got them excited about reading more of Chris Van Allsburg's books.  They have done a great job with the centers and I wanted to share the activities that they have been doing in small groups. Each day the students are expected to read a book by Chris Van Allsburg and then complete an activity that goes along with the book. (Another teacher created these awesome activities!) I have created a rubric so the students know what is expected of them as well as a quiz to make sure they really paid close attention to the books. Below are some pictures of the students working as well as the activities, rubric, and quiz I created.

Reading "Two Bad Ants"

Listening to "The Wretched Stone"

Click Here to access the Chris Van Allsburg Activities
Click Here to access the Rubric
Click Here to access the Chris Van Allsburg Quiz