A Week Full of Spiders!

This has been the week of spiders for my class!  But only the kind found in books or in our writing.  Although the colors on this spider are really pretty! But the real kind was not going to be found in my room...one little kinder girl was quite disappointed to walk in and find not one spider.  She just knew that my room was going to be filled with spiders when she walked in!!  No way, no how!  Sorry sweetie!

Even though there weren't any real spiders crawling around, we did manage to have a lot of fun and do a LOT of learning about them.  My younger students created these little spider guys.

We made K-W-L charts in several grades and found out we did not know all that much about spider webs before reading.  Then we compared the amount of knowledge we had after reading and were amazed at how much we can learn when we read!

After reading spider books from Reading A-Z, we did some writing about what we learned and found cool.  The writings on the left are from a couple of kindergartners ( Webs are sticky and Webs are round.)  and the ones on the right are from first grade.

This is from one of my reading groups and how they are using sticky notes to code what they read.  These Sticky Note Your Thinking are from my Reader's Notebook- an interactive notebook with very little cutting and gluing.  My time is limited and we just don't have time for that.  Students code information as they read and then discuss it later.  

What they code can also be used in their writing about the subject.  One girl liked coding so much that she was using it in her classroom when she read!  That is when I know information that I am teaching is truly being learned if they apply it in other places than just in my room!

Kindergarten also used these cute counting spider books.  We used them to count words, track print, and find the sight word see.

My kinders need more practice with ABCs and the order they come in.  I placed these spider web cards in my pocket chart and handed out the ones missing.  We sang our ABC song over and over for each card missing so students could place them where they belonged.

Another activity was to match the lower case letters to its mate.  This was a bit harder!  We need more practice.

Older students did short vowel and long vowel word sorting.  It was a lot of fun to have all my groups learning about spiders this past week!  The materials were freebies on TpT and books from Reading A-Z.  Students loved having something spooky to learn about for Halloween week and I loved that everything coordinated and was differentiated for each group and what they could handle.  

Hope you survived the Halloween/Fall Harvest parties!  Happy Sunday!