Thanksgiving Close Reading Freebies

Just a quick post to share with you my newest free resource! I've compiled a Thanksgiving Close Reading Pack!

The sample includes 4 different levels of a fiction Thanksgiving story. Students will read the passage, answer the questions using text evidence, and make inferences and text-to-self connections! There is something for everyone! CLICK HERE to grab it now and let your students give it a try!

Check out some of our favorite Thanksgiving books!

 

                

 Mrs. Thompson's Treasures is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

Schoolroom, Surgery, and Baby!

Wow, it has been a crazy last couple of months for our family! You may know we moved overseas back in August, and were living in a small apartment until we could get our visas and find a house to rent. We finally found a great house and moved in about a month ago.

My favorite part of the house is that I have an entire room dedicated for homeschool!! I am so grateful for this space that we have, and we finally have it all set up. Pretty much every piece of furniture came from IKEA.

 

Since it's technically a bedroom, there are built in closets, giving me lots of storage space! And to be honest, it's nice that I can hide stuff away and not worry about it all being super organized and cute :-) I also got a pocket chart for the first time! I love using it with my kindergartener. There are so many activities we can do with it.

 

 

 

In addition to moving, I was diagnosed with acute appendicitis and had an emergency appendectomy two weeks ago. It's a fairly common procedure, but I am also 24 weeks pregnant with little treasure #5, so that made things a little more complicated. Thankfully, everything went well and I have pretty much fully recovered already.

 

We had to take a few days off of school during my surgery and recovery, but we always make time to read books! My kids love "A Pie Went By" by Carolyn Dunn. It's a silly story, but great for rhyming, repetition, and sequencing. There is a recipe for King Bing's cherry pie in the book, so we made that one night. Anything for those text to self connections :)



Tricks and Treats Blog Hop

This month we are bringing you some fun Tricks & Treats for your classroom! Be sure to hop around all the different blogs and get some great ideas and freebies!



Who doesn't love pumpkins? I'm going to share with you today how to have a fun day of investigating pumpkins, while also incorporating language arts, math, science, and art!  

Here's what our day looked like:

Each of the kids got their own small pumpkin to investigate. First we talked about words that describe the outside of the pumpkin and the kids drew a picture on their investigation sheets. This is a great way to review adjectives and other descriptive language.

 

The kids made predictions about their pumpkins and wrote them down. We predicted what the inside looks like, whether it would sink or float, how many seeds are inside, weight and height, and the length around.

 

Next, we did some investigations to find out the facts!

Finding weight by measuring the kids with the pumpkin and without! Great way to incorporate more math!

Counting seeds by making groups of 10

 

We wrote the findings on the second investigation worksheet.

You can grab these worksheets for free HERE.

 

The cleaning out and counting seeds took awhile since I had to help them all with it, so if this is an activity you want to do with a classroom of students, I would suggest doing it in groups with parent volunteers!

  

 

For a fun art project, we decided to use some of the seeds for a pumpkin craft!

 

First we dyed the seeds by putting some in a plastic bag and adding a small splash of vinegar and food coloring! We made green, orange, and brown (red, green, and yellow food coloring). The kids had fun squishing the seeds inside the bags to coat them.

 

Next we laid them out on paper towels to dry. It took several hours, so we ended up finishing the craft the next day.

 

 

I printed out a pumpkin outline I found online, and had the kids cut it out and glue it on their choice of colored paper. Then we just glued the seeds on to make the pumpkin!

You can grab the pumpkin investigation sheets that we used HERE!

I also have several pumpkin freebies in my TpT store! Get each one by clicking the picture.

 

 

 

An InLinkzLink-up

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

This week was our official start back into homeschool for the year. With my 2 girls who are in preschool and kindergarten, we are working with a book each week, tying in language arts, math, and other subjects as we can.

What better book to start the year off with than Chicka Chicka Boom Boom? We have read it before, so it wasn't new to the kids, but we found a lot of fun activites to go along with it as we practiced the letters of the alphabet.

 

The book we have came with a CD of Ray Charles reading the story, along with some fun song versions of the story. So the first 2 days, I just read the story to them from the book, and the other days we listened to different tracks from the CD.

 

For some hands-on-fun, I poured some bags of dry pasta into a plastic tub, and then buried in a set of alphabet magnets. The girls dug through and had to find the letters in order. The first day we used capital letters, the second day we used lowercase.

 

 

 

I found this cute page at http://www.pre-kpages.com/abcenter/

 

I called out a letter and they used Do-A-Dot markers to dab the letter.

 

 

 

We used a coconut tree template to make our own Chicka Chicka Boom Boom trees on construction paper. I printed out bubble letters of each of their names for them to add as well.

 



 

To incorporate some math, I drew some palm trees and put them in a plastic page protector, then we made "coconuts" from playdoh and I made up some word problems for the kids to add and subtract the coconuts from the tree.

 

 

 

We also completed this Hundreds Chart Mystery Picture of a palm tree - you can grab it FREE in my TpT store HERE!

 

 

 

 

Our last craft was another tree, made from paper towel rolls and construction paper.

 



 

 

As you can see, we had a lot of fun with the story this week!

Back to School Bash!

I'm teaming up with my friends at The Elementary Entourage blog for a fun filled Back to School Bash! We are bringing you tips, ideas, lessons, and most importantly, FREEBIES for this back to school season!

 

 

One thing that I think is so important at the beginning of the school year is to build a classroom community and make each student feel like they are an important part of the class. There are so many fun activities you can do to accomplish this! Here are some of my favorites:

 

1. The Hand Tree - students trace their hands, then decorate and cut out. Use all the hands as the leaves on a tree or petals on a flower for a bulletin board display.

 



 

 

 

 

 

2. We are Family - have students bring in family photos and display them in a fun way!

 

 

 

3. We Fit Together - Each student decorates a puzzle piece to represent them, then you fit them all together for a great display!

 

 

 

4.Web of Kindness - "Another favorite activity in the compliment category is the Web of Kindness. It starts with one student holding a ball of yarn who pays a compliment to another student. At the same time he or she quickly wraps the loose end of the yarn around his or her finger and then tosses the ball to the one who was complimented. This goes on until a web is created. It's really neat and creates a great visual of teamwork. I end the activity with the notion of no matter what grade or age you are, kindness sees no boundaries. It is something we all want and something we should all share with others."

 



 

 

5. Who Am I?  I've shared this before, but it fits my theme perfectly, so I thought I'd share it again. :) This fun FREEBIE is a great get to know you activity that helps even the shy students be able to share things about themselves. Students fill out the questions and draw a picture of themselves. Then you can gather them up and give the student a "quiz" to see how well they know their classmates! Try it again at the end of the year to show how much they have learned about each other!

 



 

 

 

More back to school resources: