The Little Red Hen Sequencing and Planting a Garden

On Tuesdays and Thursdays our class is fortunate to have an intern, Mrs. Sanford, from Dallas Baptist University assist in our class for a few hours as a part of her coursework. Today she taught a fantastic integrated Language Arts and Science lesson to the students. Mrs. Sanford started her lesson by greeting the students at the door and having them choose an animal card. The animal cards correlated to the book she was going to read during her lesson. She red The Little Red Hen by Byron Barton and as she read, the students sequenced the events in the story using picture cards and the Follow the Yellow Brick Road Retelling cards from The First Grade Parade.

Mrs. Sanford then had the students transition to the Promethean Board where they reviewed, wrote, and repeated the defition of sequencing. At the board, they reviewed various transition words that can be used to make writing more interesting. They then decided which transition words to use on the class Flow Map. After deciding this, students built their own garden in a large container. Mrs. Sanford explained how to plant seeds and the needs of plants. As she explained the steps, the students followed the multi-step directions. With each step, the students used interactive writing to record the steps they took on a Flow Map on the Promethan Board.

After planting the miniature garden and sequencing the events on a Flow Map, the students wrote the events using complete sentences on a flower template. On the petals of the flower, the students wrote transition words. The students were engaged the entire lesson. Mrs. Sanford and the students did an excellent job!

KidBlog Update!

The students have been blogging away! They have written over 250 posts so far. Their latest blog entries are about additive patterns. When they wrote about additive patterns, they first created patterns in Kidspiration which then then exported to our class' shared folder. They then had to import the photo into their blog. Although the steps to export and import seemed tricky at first, the students were up the challenge and were very successful. They have also been using our writing strategies from Write From the Beginning to write personal narratives. They have also been practicing writing sentences using word wall and phonics words as well as using adverbs from our grammar lessons. When you get a few minutes, read their great posts at their KidBlog.