Fun in First

A Teaching Blog by Jodi Southard

bats

Nonfiction in October

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I LOVE all of the fun topics to teach about in October!  It’s a time of year when I can’t wait to pull out all of my nonfiction books and do tons of read alouds.  One of my students this week said, “Wow!  You always have a book about everything we are learning about.”  Ha!  Well, yes I do 🙂
I created this Nonfiction in October unit and have been working away at it for the last couple of weeks.
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Nonfiction-in-October-1478159
 
This past week, we have been learning all about bats using this packet.
 
We read our information page and worked on text evidence by highlighting our answers in the text.

We created anchor charts.
 
 We also worked a lot with vocabulary.
 
 
The other topics included in this packet are:

 
 This 100 page unit will easily carry you through October.
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Nonfiction-in-October-1478159
 
 This packet is on sale in my TpT store through the weekend.



We Are Going Batty!

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Things have been batty in 1st grade.  We have been busy, busy, busy reading tons of fiction and nonfiction books about bats.  It’s always fun learning more about bats and sorting through the myths and facts.  We created this anchor chart on Monday.
We thought of things that we knew about bats first. Then after reading a nonfiction book, we added our new learning.
The students also filled out their own charts for things that they “wondered” about bats.
The sheet above will be included in my upcoming packet “Nonfiction in October.”
Yesterday and today we worked on writing about bats and creating our own bats.

 
We’ve also been reading a lot of fiction bat books and using my new Fun with Fiction {Bats} packet.
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fun-with-Fiction-Bats-1465998
Reading fiction and nonfiction books about bats has really allowed my students to distinguish between the two.
 
We will continue learning about bats all week.  I’m hoping to have my latest packet finished soon, which includes tons of resources for teaching about bats, spiders, fire safety, owls, and pumpkins. 

 
How can you not just LOVE October?
 


Five for Friday{ish}

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I know, I know…it’s Saturday, but I’m just now getting around to linking up for Five for Friday.
http://doodlebugsteaching.blogspot.com/2014/09/five-for-friday-linky-party-september_26.html
 
It’s been awhile since I’ve linked up with this Linky Party, but I felt like I had a bunch of randomness to share and this was perfect.
Now that it’s officially fall, we started writing about it.  I shared this writing freebie on my blog this week.
 

We have been waiting not so patiently for our butterflies and on Friday, we finally had one emerge from it’s chrysalis.  The students were SO excited.  “This is the best day of my life,” was said more than once.  Yes, they were hyper and yes, I felt sorry for our PE teacher because she had to have my class right after the butterfly came out, but I was so happy that they were able to see it and they didn’t miss it over the weekend.

 
This next week, we will be learning all about bats.  We will be reading tons of nonfiction books, but I also have a lot of fiction books about bats as well that I wanted to throw in and have some fun with.  I created this little unit that we will be using next week with our fiction books.
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fun-with-Fiction-Bats-1465998
 
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Fun-with-Fiction-Bats-1465998
 
I’m so thankful for the amazing weather we’ve been having in Indiana lately because both of my girls are playing fall soccer and we are at the soccer fields three days a week. 
 
I have had a lot of requests to bundle my Games Galore packets and I FINALLY did.  I am not finished with November, December, and January yet, but they will be added as I finish them.
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Games-Galore-The-Bundle-1458011
 
These NO PREP games are perfect for centers, as a time filler when you just have a couple of minutes, or when you know your students need to move and do something different. 
If you just need the October edition, you can find it by clicking below.
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Games-Galore-No-Prep-Math-Literacy-Games-for-October-1453267

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Games-Galore-No-Prep-Math-Literacy-Games-for-October-1453267
 
Happy weekend everyone!


It’s October!

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It’s officially my favorite month!  I love October…the weather, pumpkins, the changing leaves, Halloween decorations, and the fact that my first graders always seem to get into the groove of things by October.  I always tell myself that they will be first graders in October.  Until then, they are still Kindergarteners. 
Today we started learning about bats.  We created this chart to discuss our schema.
After reading a nonfiction book about bats, we added misconceptions and new learning to our chart.
We discussed that some types of bats eat mosquitoes and that they can eat up to 600 in one hour.  I put my students into 6 groups.  They cut out mosquitoes and glued them onto paper plates.  This is one of my favorite activities.  It is such a great {and disgusting} visual.

 
You can find some freebies from my post last year by clicking here.
 
We also started our October Fluency passages today.
 
These are the same ones I have had available, I just updated the cover.  Here are some samples of my fluency passages.
 

 

 
I hope you’re as excited about October as I am.
 


Informative Writing and Bat Freebies

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We began learning about bats this week.  I love teaching about bats.  Even though I think they are kind of gross, they truly are useful animals and I like to clear up the common myths about bats. 
You can see my posts from last year about bats by clicking HERE and HERE.
I have placed all of my bat freebies into one packet.  Click on the picture below to head on over to Teachers Pay Teachers to download for FREE.
 
Here are some new items that we completed this year and I have included in the freebie above.

 
Before completing our writing above, I introduced Informative/Explanatory writing. (Common Core Standard W.2)
 
These go along with my “What is Narrative Writing?” posters that you can find HERE.
You can download the Informative Writing Posters for FREE at Teachers Pay Teachers by clicking HERE.
 
 


More Bat Activities

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One of my favorite bat activities to do every year is to tell students the number of mosquitoes that one bat can eat in an hour… 600!  If that doesn’t make you love bats, I don’t know what will!!  Then I put students into 6 groups, give each group 100 mosquitoes to cut out, and a paper plate.  Each group cuts out 100 mosquitoes and glues them to the plate.
 This is such a great {and disgusting} visual.  You can download 100 mosquitoes by clicking here.
We also talked about the size of bats.  The smallest bat is the Bumblebee Bat with a 5 inch wingspan and the largest is the Flying Fox with a 6 foot wingspan.  We measured these two lengths and cut yarn to show them.
 If you want the signs for these lengths and for the mosquitoes, click here.
Next,we wrote about the things we have learned about bats.  We filled out a graphic organizer first, then transfered it to our final draft.  Click here for these pages.
I love this one, “Bats are the best thing that ever happened to me.”  Too cute! 
 Tomorrow we will be playing a fun game outside that is very similar to Marco Polo.  One or two students will be blindfolded {bats} and the other students will be walking around them {mosquitoes.}  The bats will call out “Echo” and the mosquitoes will call out “Location.”  The bats will have to tag the mosquitoes.  The kids love this and it really makes that great vocabulary word, echolocation, stick in their little brains.