Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Johnny Appleseed and Scarecrows

Wow, it's been a while! School has been super busy of course. Here are some updates from our class:

We made the Johnny Appleseeds posted by Kerri over at Teacher Bits and Bobs. I love this project! It gave the kids such a confidence boost when they saw how nice their drawings looked! I modified the tissue paper to be just torn construction paper and it worked out just fine!

We also read stories about scarecrows and created this TLC project. It was fun and gave the kids the opportunity to do fringe cutting on the straw! I love to see how each scarecrow has its own personality! So cute :)



 I have done a few of the TLC projects from the Fall book and so far... I'm loving it! We did the Columbus Day project last week and I can already see a HUGE improvement in their work. They are more careful with their cutting, they know words like horizontal and vertical, and they are better at following step-by-step directions. I have the Winter and Spring books on my wish list for my birthday and Christmas, so hopefully I'll have a complete set soon :)

In other news, I am thinking about starting a blog/website that banks "Higher Order Thinking" questions for some of the most common children's books we use. Our school is BIG on using higher order thinking and a few of our staff members were mentioning how there is no resource for these questions. Coming up with those synthesis, analysis, and evaluation questions is challenging, and every teacher shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel for each book they do.
Good idea or is there something just like that already out there?