Brains, and Skeletons, and Innards...OH MY!

We had SO much fun this week with our parts of the body!! I did things differently than what I normally do. When I taught 3rd grade, I normally just focused on the different bones of the skeleton. You can click HERE to get the post. :) BUT, after looking at my new 2nd grade standards (YAY for finally being back down in 2nd!!), I noticed they needed to learn a lot more :) Soooo......here's how we taught it throughout out our week. NOW, first, I have to tell you, that I don't always teach out of our reading series (eeek!!!! shhh!!! Don't tell on me! lol). I teach the skills and everything that goes along with it - but sometimes I like to be creative and teach my own stories (integrating lets me get SO much more into my curriculum, and my kids are really becoming better at nonfiction stories - yay!!)....and you know what??? My kids still do FABULOUS on their tests!!

We started reading Inside your Outside. I finally bought myself a copy, but my fabulous friend lent me hers in the interim. :) Each day we read a different section of the book - 

Tuesday: The Brain

Wednesday: The Skeleton

Thursday: The Innards 

We also talked about our grammar (plural nouns) and did a phonics hunt (s-blends) throughout the week in the book. See?? We can integrate with everything! lol

For the skeleton day, we created a skeleton - and labeled the important components (well, what I thought was important and what our standards say is important..lol)

We used Mr. Bones to help us with our labeling :)

For math, to correlate with our bones, I created a Boney Input and Output Math worksheet for center time.

Click HERE to get it!

And then we made lungs!! How cool are these?? My go to girl for science told me about these last year, so I just had to make one for demonstration.

don't mind the almost 7 month prego belly-lol

Click here for her directions that she used with her 5th grade class.

Click here for her directions on measuring the digestive track she did with her 5th grade kiddos. 

Then my friend Heather showed me what she has done with her kids in the past - they traced out the Heart, Lungs, Stomache, and Intestine....

....and then glued them down and drew a person around the Innards.

For writing, we first read Skeleton Hiccups. Such a cute book!! Then we did a circle map of all the ways they know how to get rid of their hiccups. 

On the other side of the paper, we planned. First the Grabber - then the 3 different ways - then the Closer. 

We then, of course modeled our writing. We used different color markers to show that we used each part of our planning paper - and we used check marks ON the planning paper. We were working with sequencing this week, so they had to underline their transition words: Fist, Then, and Finally were the ones for this writing. 

Click HERE for the tracer patterns for the innards and the skull puppet I used for the writing. The puppet is supposed to go on a paper bag, but I though he'd be cute on the writing. They came out cute! Lol...one of my kids said "Mrs. Ross - they are taking a HUGE bite!" lol