Rainbow Week

We decided to close out our colors unit out with a rainbow-themed week. I have really enjoyed spending all this time on fun projects. I just realized that we were incredibly busy this week, so be warned that this is a pretty long post! :)

Monday we read Kitten Red, Yellow, Blue and made plenty of connections. Everyone was very excited to create a page for our class book. We talked about things we liked to do and colors that might go with those verbs. Our creativity was in full-effect. I was SO excited to pull Guided Reading groups for the first time this year! Everyone was actively engaged in Daily Five, and I could not be more proud of all my firsties!

Tuesday we read A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni. I am such a huge fan of all his books - with gorgeous illustrations and heartfelt messages. After we read the story we made our first Story Map of the year! Last year I found a wonderful idea on The First Grade Parade for retelling. As a class, we talked about The Wizard of Oz, and I was glad to know that a lot of kids knew the story! We then talked about "following the yellow brick road" when we are retelling a story so that other people can know what happened without having to read the book. Using a Pinterest-inspired Story Map anchor chart, we retold the story as a whole class. The students were very motivated and seemed to have a wonderful time!

Wednesday we read Purple, Yellow, and Green by Robert Munsch. He is such a fun author! If you go to his website, you can actually listen to him read some of his stories. The kids LOVED being able to hear his voice while we looked at the pictures of the book. After the story, we followed the yellow brick road again then individually created a Tree Map for the story map as well. This was the first time we'd done Tree Maps for retelling this year, and I thought it went pretty well! These kiddos really seem to understand story maps!

For writing, we researched an octopus on PebbleGo this week. I was glad that most of us realized we were researching octopi because it was short o week! After we wrote our nonfiction stories, we illustrated and drew settings for our octopi. These came out wonderfully!

Thursday we read A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon. This is SUCH a great book! We made text-to-text connections with No, David!, and I think that really excited the kids because they LOVE those books. After we read this hilarious story, we went down the yellow brick road again as a whole group. Then we made connections to the book by thinking of what bad cases we might wake up with and what we'd have to eat to get rid of them. Some of the students' ideas really cracked me up! I was glad to hear that some of them suggested eating spinach and bananas to help clear up their symptoms. :)

Friday was a very fun day! I remembered a project we'd done in my Music Theory class in college, and I knew I had to do with the kiddos. We listened to a "Many Colors CD" that our professor had given us, and then we drew what those colors reminded us of. The students and I discussed what emotions we had when we thought of certain colors. Then, I played the CD for them and they drew what they were feeling. We talked about our drawings in our groups, then one of my friends had the wonderful idea of dancing our emotions, too! Of course I had to play the CD again so that we could responsibly move around the classroom and let our emotions out. I wish I could post those pictures for y'all, because it was quite a hoot!

We also read My Many Colored Days by Dr. Seuss and created a class book based on our colors and emotions again.

We incorporated a lot of short o work into math this week. We have been studying different addition strategies, focusing on parts of numbers. I read 10 Apples Up on Top one day, and we made part-part-whole stories using parts of 10. This is always a big hit because the book I have used to be my dad's when he was in first grade. The kids are always impressed by how old it is. :) We also made part-part-wholes using dogs and frogs. I gave each student a domino, and they created their picture based on it. This was a good assessment tool for the end of the week.

We had a really fun science experiment on Friday. To close up the week, we did a Rainbow Milk experiment. The kids absolutely loved it! We added food coloring to milk, with drops of soap. The soap helps the food coloring mix together to create new colors. We talked about primary and secondary colors, then I mixed primary colors individually so the kids could see them mixing. We made sure to record our results in our Science Journals using the Scientific Method. This was a HUGE hit!

We had another great week full of learning and fun! I can't wait for next week. We're going to start doing October-themed activities, and it will be great!