Whew…Holiday overload and FREEBIES! Updated with pics!

Is it just me or is Halloween through March filled with one wonderful holiday after the other!? I swear I never covered all this in 4th grade, but my kiddos in 2nd are blank slates!
We started with week with the ye old Schema, New Learning, Misconceptions chart (Thanks Debbie Miller and Deanna Jump!) I asked my kids to write anything they knew about the first Thanksgiving…ANYTHING. Well, they may know the words “pilgrim” and “Indian” and “Thanksgiving”, but that about covers it…One kiddos was able to tell us that Indians didn’t know it was Thanksgiving when they went to eat! Yes! Adorable.
Tuesday and today we learned about the Mayflower. I ADORE Scholastic’s Thanksgiving site. We toured the Mayflower and read the letter from a pilgrim girl named Lizzy while she was on the voyage. After the virtual tour we had the kids tell me the main idea of each labeled part of the ship and I typed them as we went along. I drew a big Mayflower and we pasted our facts to her. {pics to come}

I was inspired by Cara’s adorable Mayflower books from last year {this was actually my first teacher blog viewing…} and we made those today.
{They are loving snazzy scissors lately!}
{our ship was a little on the small side...always next year}
{Survey from Cara's post above-they LOVED this!}
{Hope you can read upside down! opps!}

Here’s a little cover label for your ship if you like.
mayflower
Tomorrow we will learn about the pilgrims using our Scholastic News Interactive and mags, read a few A Day in the Life of…books, and make these foldables from Lesson Plans SOS
Friday we will move on to the Wampanoag Indians and next week I will focus on bringing it all together. I can’t wait to share all our fun in pictures with you! I am so excited to make these placemats my teammie made too! A-dor-able!!!
And she’s also giving away a student made invite to the First Thanksgiving!
And to make this week even better my iPhone 4S arrived yesterday and I snagged some touch screen compatible gloves at Target for $10! Woo-hoo!

And right in time for planning ahead, here’s a freebie that I used with my 4th graders and a Christmas Around the World group research project. It could be used with younger ones, too!
xmas
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3 comments:

  1. Hey! Would LOVE to know more about your Christmas around the world project. I was thinking about doing something like this. Do you provide the research for the students or do they search themselves through internet?

    `Meg

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  2. Thank you SOOOO much for the link to the Scholastic website! I was able to throw together a quick lesson last night with that link that I thought my 2nd graders would really enjoy. To top it all off, my principal stopped by for a surprise observation while I was teaching this lesson. SHE LOVED IT! Thank you again! :o)

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  3. Yay! We focused in the pilgrims today and watched the tour of the Plymouth village. It was awesome and so informative!
    Meghan-I assigned each group a country and made sure it was one that celebrated Christmas and had lots of info. A quick google search will popup a great site!

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