Our Seasons of Change: Spinning Webs of Knowledge

Do you ever have moments in your life where you stop and stand in wonder at the beautiful world surrounding you? The colours of Fall are evident all over and that cozy feeling which comes along with the colder weather is here. I have to say that Fall is my favourite season! I love wearing sweaters, listening to the crunching leaves, looking at all the beautiful colours, and taking trips to apple orchards and pumpkin farms. Oh, I can't leave out the yummy food that seems to go along with this time of year.
In the last post, I said that I was going to share some photos of a few apple activities that we were in the middle of finishing. The first lesson was based on the Dr.Seuss story "10 Apples Up On Top". The children were told to print the numbers 1 to 10 on apple pictures. Then they had to place their apples in order and colour the apples in a pattern.

In another lesson, the children learned the parts of an apple and were asked to create their own apples from construction paper. After they completed their apple creations, they added labels to the different parts (i.e., stem). Isn't it sweet how they all turned out so very different?

Following our week of studying apples, we became caught up in spider webs. We began by looking at the differences and similarities between fiction and nonfiction books, using spiders as our topic.

The children were placed in groups where they looked at fiction and nonfiction books about spiders. They put down all of their information in words and pictures on paper provided for each group.

As a large group, we recorded all of the facts we already knew about spiders onto a chart.

The children were then asked to select 3 - 6 of their favourite facts. They wrote these facts onto their own spider recording sheet and then illustrated each fact. The next step was to take each fact and write a complete sentence. The class enjoyed every minute learning about these hairy creatures. Did you know that spiders are not insects? They are part of the arachnid family because they have 8 legs and insects have 6 (interesting hmm..). Our final writing piece will be shown next week; however, I have a few pictures of our nonfiction writing journey to share.

Thank you to Reagan Tunstall for providing such an exciting writing activity. The children were thoroughly engaged through the whole writing process.

We have been continuing to focus on nouns and adjectives for the past few weeks. We recently added verbs to our body of knowledge. As a class, we created a chart using spiders as our noun. We came up with many adjectives to describe our hairy friends and then verbs to explain their actions.

After creating this chart, the children selected 3 adjectives and 3 verbs to create a poem based on spiders (noun). The children used their hands to create their creepy spiders. I will take a close-up photo to share next week.

By the end of the week, the children were overflowing with knowledge about spiders. They watched short video clips on spiders, they created poetry and nonfiction pieces of writing about spiders, and for the big finale, they made chocolate and pretzel spider webs. The class LOVED creating their webs of delight!!

We had a wonderful experience learning about spiders in our nonfiction unit. Next week we look at bats and their use of echolocation (very interesting), focusing on the 5 senses.

Here are our turkey cards that focused on colour patterns and writing about what they were thankful for. I sure have a thoughtful class this year!!

Enjoy your long weekend with family and friends! Gobble, Gobble