Ocean "Week"

I'm not sure why I chose to call this Ocean Week... because it was definitely was not a week long unit.. more like 3 weeks.

We started off with Pout Pout Fish. One of my all-time favorite books! I've decided that next year, I'm starting off with Pout Pout Goes to School.

We did a summary for it, which lent itself easily to senquencing, problem/solution, turning event...

Ok. Let's talk about my drawing of Pout Pout. I mean this girl can't even draw, and I'm pretty impressed with him!

I taught the kids how to draw him for their cover page of their summary.

Then we did the free Pout Pout craft from First Grade Blue Skies and the character changing paper from Deanna Jump.

I had a sub one day, the day my Autumn had her VPK graduation!

So, I prepared Deanna and DeeDee's May Guiding Readers pack - the Hello Ocean and they created their books. They turned out so cute!

That was a fun intro to our Non-fiction unit.  First up? Sharks!  

This book (that I chose to project on the screen instead of print out because I'm lacking time these days!) comes from Deanna's Ocean Unit

I really like these Fact Finder Question pages she has in her pack.

I took them to the computer lab so they could all do research on sharks! Have you ever tried PebbleGo? It's like an encyclopedia for kids - it's really good!! They had a few different sharks on their site so I let them choose which one they wanted. They had to write down 2 main facts and 1 fun fact. They were so into it!

They glued their research page under their writing page when they completed the craft.

As a final "assessment" we did the fact or fiction page from Deanna's pack.

I kept the Schema chart up the whole unit, just because they like seeing all of their learning.

We did one for whales too...

Here are the final writing and crafts.

...with their research page underneath.

Then it was on to sea turtles... (that turtle directed drawing hanging up is from ABC Schoolhouse)

After they wrote about their learning for turtles, they did a different kind of craft - directed drawing meets tear art.  They turned out so cute!

Then it was on to jellyfish! Luckily, one of our Scholastic News this month was about dangerous summer animals..and jellyfish were the main attraction.  So we took some notes from the article and then they wrote their facts (with a conclusion).

The craft this time was one of my favorites! They watercolor paint a coffee filter.

After it dries, you tape on some streamers (for the fat tentacles) and ribbon (for the skinny tentacles).

In 2nd grade, there's a really cool story in Journeys about jellyfish. I posted about it {HERE} last year.

When I ran out of room on my bulletin board, I hung them out in the hallway.

Those crabs. SO cute!!  The writing page is mine (and so are the turtle and jellyfish pages you saw), but the idea for the lesson and crab from Traci over at Dragonflies in First. Such a cute lesson!

Then we watched Backyardigans (because there are 5 days left of school and after all this, I was done and needed time to regroup) and had some clam cookies! My teammate found this somewhere and we had to have it today!

whew!

That was a whirlwind of Ocean fun!! It's one of my favorite units and there is SO much more I would love to do. But we only have 5 more days left, so I must move on!

We are actually in the middle of working on our Memory books too.

We do a page or so every day and then the last few days and we'll start gluing in the pages next week.

You can read more about them in {THIS} post.

Whew!

I think I just made up for not posting much in the last month or so - what do you think?!