Spiders are NOT scary!

       Some other topics I love to learn about around Halloween are bats and spiders!  With all of the curriculum that we are required to teach, I have to be creative about how to fit in those "fun extras" that enthuse my students about learning.  These two topics are easy...there are tons of non-fiction books at their level that we use during Guided Reading, Shared Reading, and Read Aloud.  We write about what we learn and I was able to find some good quality math activities that fit with the 8 Best Math Practices that I will talk a lot about on this blog! 

     When teaching my students what good readers do in their minds while reading, I use a variety of resources.  One of my very favorites that I use a LOT is The Primary Comprehension Toolkit created by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis.  I like it because they are short, simple lessons that the kids love and are very engaged in.  This week we delved into the strategy of Asking Questions using a Time for Kids article about spiders.  I could not have asked for the lesson to go better!  The students were so motivated and engaged.  The questions and learning that they came up with were stellar!  I was able to learn where some of them are at with their writing development as well as what they found fascinating in our reading.  Here are a few examples.


"How do spiders jump to catch their prey?"  "I learned that spiders make trap doors."



"I wonder if the spider falls in the water?"  "I learned that they're sneaky." 

"I didn't know that there was a crab spider."

      During Math we did a problem solving activity I found on Mathwire.com.  Each pair of students received a card with some information on it.  The card told them how many heads and how many legs they had to use.  Then they had to figure out how many spiders and insects they could possibly have with that combination.  It took some of the groups several different tries to come up with a correct solution.   One of the 8 Math Practices we will be working on this year is Make Sense of Problems and Persevere in Solving Them.  The second Math Practice we utilized was Using Appropriate Tools Correctly.  In this case, they used Q-tips and cotton balls to represent the heads and legs.   They also used pencil/paper to show their solution. 

And as a culminating activity we did some writing about what we had learned.  We are working really hard in writing at adding at least three good details to tell people information about our topic.