Hello and welcome to the second annual Winter Wonderland link up! At the bottom of all of The Reading Crew’s posts, there is a “map” of the blogs so you can hop through them all at once, visit some today and some later in the week, or see what best matches your literacy needs.
The Snow Globe Family is one of my very favorite books because it reminds me of that anticipation of a coming snow! Here in Georgia, we don’t get snow much (and yes, it often shuts the state down) so anytime the “S-word” is in the forecast, I get very excited!
The Snow Globe Family is an adorable book by Jane O’Connor and illustrated by S.D. Schindler. It tells the story of TWO families- one that lives in a big house on a hill, as well as the family that lives INSIDE the snow globe sitting on their mantle! Everyone in the “big” family has forgotten about the snow globe – everyone except Baby…
One of the things they will notice right away, of course, is how tiny the snow globe family is. I suggest completing the first activity while you read the book the first time. This activity asks the students to note the details (evidence) the author gives to show that the snow globe family is small. This can be done together as you read on a chart, or depending on your students, you might give them the activity page to fill in as you read. The author does a great job describing how small things are in the snow globe, such as their footprints being smaller than sprinkles. After reading the story, either the same day or the next day, complete the Venn diagram to compare the snow globe family and the big family, this time focusing on more than just the size of them. You might want to re-read the story for this activity, or thumb through and show them certain pages, but I would first see what they remember on their own!
This book is perfect to extend into your writing time, too! Students can imagine they were in a snow globe and draw a scene, which would make a great story starter. I have included a page they can use to draw their scene, as well as a lined writing prompt page.
You can also turn this writing activity into an adorable craft! Check out my blog post to see what I did in my fourth grade classroom, which you can easily do in any grade! I took pictures of the students pretending to be in their snow globe. I also traced around a small plastic (clear) plate on construction paper and students illustrated the inside of the circle, complete with their photograph. We dropped some fake snow and glitter flakes (and even some snowflake confetti) onto their illustration, then I hot glued the plate on to the paper for them. The “snow” moved freely around under the plate. My students absolutely loved this project, and it made their writing some of the best they had done all year!
Pin for Later:
If you want even more IN-DEPTH step-by-step help with implementing mentor sentences, check out my courses!
Jigsaw Puzzle Day!
You might recall from my previous post that I do an ABC Countdown at the end of the year. Even if you don’t do a countdown, you can easily incorporate many of these “days” into your end of the year! One of the days my kids loved was Jigsaw Puzzle Day. We put puzzles together and made our own puzzles, too!
I have a cabinet full of puzzles I’ve acquired from places like the Dollar Tree that my kids like to put together sometimes when we have indoor recess. It’s amazing how many of them don’t even have puzzles at home! We work on puzzles throughout the day on Jigsaw Puzzle Day.
Here’s a close up:
You can find this puzzle piece to download for free here!
We also made puzzles all about 4th grade. This was during Teacher Appreciation Week, so you’ll also see all of my gorgeous flowers they got me! :o) The finished puzzles are something fun and colorful for the wall- and my kids loved looking at everyone else’s when there was some free time.
You can download this freebie here!
Don’t teach 4th? Here is a puzzle template freebie!
If you want to make a smaller puzzle, Krista has some free puzzle piece clip art you can download!
I hope this will be a fun way for your kiddos to reflect back on the year! I know mine sure enjoyed it! :o)
What If You Had Animal Parts…!? {Freebies!}
Hello again, friends! Starting Friday at 3:15, I’m on Spring Break (woohoo!!!) and for the first time EVER, I already have my entire week planned for the week we return! What?! No, really!!! I do!
We are learning about animal adaptations in science, so when we return, we’ll be using all three of Sandra Markle‘s awesome “What If You Had” books!
I have created activities that go along with our adaptation unit for the students to complete as we read each book book, and you can download each one for free!
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| Click to see this book on Amazon! |
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| Click to download the freebie! |
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| Click to see this book on Amazon! |
For each animal, the author includes what would happen if YOU had that animal’s hair, so I will wait to read that part until the students give their own ideas about each animal.
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| Click to download the freebie! |
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| Click to see this book on Amazon! |
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| Click to download the freebie! |
I hope you enjoy these freebies, and these books! My kids absolutely loved “Teeth” and “Hair,” so I knew I had to get “Feet” when it was released earlier this year! If you have followed my blog since last year, you might already have the teeth freebie, but don’t forget about the other great book from the same blog post last year, What Do You Do With A Tail Like This? There’s a freebie in the post for this awesome book, too! :o)
For more Science Resources and ideas, follow my Pinterest board!
Lucky You! Blog Hop
Very Important Info About Your TPT Free Downloads!
Hello friends! I am blogging today to tell you some very important information about changes that have been made to TPT. They aren’t bad changes at all, but it’s something that us sellers want you to know about…
As you know, providing feedback on purchases AND freebies is equally important to sellers. Not only is it polite to show that you are grateful, but it helps us know we’ve done something you like and we should continue! Or, of course, use it if you need to provide constructive criticism…
However, when you download freebies now, instead of getting the option to immediately leave feedback, TPT shows you some other items you might like, too- which makes sense because you can’t really leave feedback until you use it, right?
BUT it’s important to remember to go back and leave feedback once you have used it! How do you do that? How will you ever remember? Well, TPT made it easy! First, go to your purchases:
Then, click on the Free Downloads tab!
Last, click on the “provide feedback” link under the product name. Remember, the more you show sellers you love our freebies, the more motivated we are to keep making freebies for you!
And hey- check out this great tip from Diane at Fifth in the Middle! If you want to make sure you’ve left feedback on everything, you can sort your downloads!
Now, what if you downloaded a freebie and realized it wasn’t really what you thought and you aren’t going to use it? No harm, no foul! You didn’t pay for it, so no loss for you, right? There is no need to tell the seller this- remember, feedback is given after you’ve used it. But please try to remember to leave some love when you DO use it. Here is an example of why I say this:
Almost 7,000 people downloaded this freebie, and 34 people rated it. Now, did 6,857 people download and actually use it? Probably not. But odds are, more than 34 people did. It’s okay if you don’t remember to go in right away and leave feedback- but when you go leave feedback on paid products (gotta get those credits!!) go ahead in to your freebies and leave some love on those, too!
And hey, if you don’t want something in your free downloads list anymore, just click that little green X on the right of the item in the list that says “remove.”
And last but not least, here is a tip about your purchased products and freebies- sometimes, sellers make mistakes. And SOMETIMES, they add to the product you’ve already gotten. When either of these things happens, they mark the file as revised. But if you are like me and have a bunch of things in your lists, you might not see those revisions right away… so you also want to sort by “Recently Revised” every now and then and check to see what you might be missing!
Please spread the word to all of those you know who download from TPT! :o)
Five For Friday: Weather Edition!
You can read more about how I used this book, as well as Come On, Rain! in reading this week in my Workshop Wednesday post!
My kids have gotten really good at imitating the week’s mentor sentence! It’s getting hard for me to pick only four for the wall. They are also loving our interactive notebook activities for language arts– this week’s was all about vivid verbs.
We also did interactive notebook activities for our weather skills!
And we did interactive notetaking with a passage from the website, k12reader.com. This is my go-to site for leveled articles on all kinds of topics!
We also made cloud models!!
And last, but not least, we made our own weather instruments!
Want the directions to make these in your classroom, too?
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