Our January unit was based on The Mitten, the beautifully rewritten Ukrainian folktale by Jan Brett. We had tons of fun with this winter theme!
We began by doing a storyboard, focusing on the characters of the story, the setting and what happened in the beginning, middle and end. Afterwards, the munchkins made and used fun story pieces to retell the story with each other.
Which was more fun?
Getting all the characters in?
Or the BIG sneeze when they all flew back out?
After that fun, we decided to create our own version of The Mitten. Each munchkin chose four animals to draw going into his or her mitten. When it was completed, each munchkin had created 4 great pages of a book written and illustrated entirely on their own!
Here are some of the beautiful pages and fantastic writing!
"A hippopotamus is in the mitten."
"A cat is in the mitten."
"A dog is in the mitten."
"A pig is in the mitten."
"A bear is in the mitten."
"A(n) alligator is in the mitten."
"A fish is in the mitten."
"A fox is in the mitten."
"A wolf is in the mitten."
"A snake is in the mitten."
"A butterfly is in the mitten."
"A mouse is in the mitten."
We continued with some other language activities, focusing on color words. The munchkins used their great reading skills to decode a little patterned text booklet, coloring the mittens on each page to match the color word in the text. They also had fun with a quick color word worksheet. It was a chance to get our markers out too!
The munchkins also enjoyed making a pair of mittens for our back bulletin board. It was interesting to think about what kinds of things come in pairs and then work on developing proper sentence structure by writing the simple sentence:
I need two mittens for my hands.
This was a fantastic way to work on the double "ee" vowel blend, as well as many of the sight words we know. It was also a great lesson in adding plural "s" at the end of a word. Of course, the most fun came after the munchkins wrote the sentence and got to decorate them!
Although this unit was perfect for all sorts of language activities, we didn't want to forget about math! The munchkins had a chance to...
pattern mittens...
measure mittens...
sort mittens...
and graph mittens!
After we graphed our real mittens in a floor graph, the munchkins worked on transferring the data into a bar graph.
Well done!
Now you know...this can't be all. Where was the food?
Bread and butter mittens!
(decorated, of course...)
I think that smile says it all!
Keep those mittens on! It's mighty cold outside!
Until next time...
Giggles,
Mrs. D.
