Retelling Stories is "Weinderful"!

This past week we worked on retelling stories and my cuties above helped me out!  (Well, not my actual pups, but rather wiener-dog inspired lessons.)

All year, we have been using my retell ribbon to retell stories that we have read.  I am sure many of you have seen this floating around pinterest.  I made it last year and my cuties from last year really learned how to retell using it.  It has been great to use it all year with this group.

Basically it's a ribbon with these wooden pieces and buttons glued to it.  The tree represents the setting.  The cat represents characters.  The three buttons represent the beginning, middle, and end.  The ribbon represents how the author tied up his message in the book.  (What did we learn from this book?)  

We made our own retell ribbons to keep  in our book boxes this week.

 Click on the picture above to print off the pieces from my website.

I will admit that in the beginning I didn't go into a lot detail about beginning, middle and end until this last week.  I basically just let them tell me three things from the story at the start of the year and then moved into telling me more big ideas toward the middle of the year.  This past week we really focused on what the beginning, middle and end meant.

I used this book:

It is so stinkin' cute and I met the author at the International Reading Association a few weeks ago and he autographed it for us!  (This book also travels with our weekend friend.)

Then we wrote what happened at the beginning, middle, and end, with my guidance on my Kim Adsit inspired chart.

(Please forgive my terrible printing and unfinished chart.  This time of year gets crazy.  I will cutesie it up for next year - I promise!)

Then I typed up what my cuties had helped me write and we made our own wiener wolves.

 How cute are it's tiny legs!

Well, I am heading to bed.  We have 5 1/2 school days left.  I am incredibly sad to leave this group.  They have touched my heart in a huge way.  I just want to make every day count and make all 5 1/2 special for them.  

Have a happy week!

Animal Research Project

We have been learning about animals for the past few weeks and really showed off our learning with an animal research project.  Here is the finished product:

We attached a rubric to the back of our projects and colored in each of the things that living things needs when we added them to our projects.

To make the project, each student chose an animal based on a set of Pebble books I checked out from the library.  We used the books and the website, Pebble Go, to learn about our animals.

Pebble Go also helped us with research skills and allowed us to integrate technology into our learning.  They LOVED using it!

It is a VERY useful sight for kinders because it meant for emergent readers.  The site is written in kid friendly language and reads the information to students.  It also has videos of the animals and allows students to listen to the sounds the animal makes.

We also wrote books about our animals that included a table of contents and information we learned about our animals.  Of course we dedicated our books, too!  (They LOVE that dedication stamp!)

We used many organizers and such to creat these projects.  You can get them in my shop as a freebie.

Happy Sunday, everyone!