Fairy Tale Fun... with Sock Puppets!

This coming week we are wrapping up our fairy tale genre study in 3rd grade ELA!  I'm so excited and just had to share about our week...


Tomorrow the kids will be writing a script with a partner of a conversation summarizing one of the fairy tales we read.

On Tuesday, the kids will use a super fun iPad app called "SOCK PUPPETS" to bring their script to life!  You can download a free version of the app and students can record for 30 seconds.  We've purchased the app, which allows for 90 seconds of recording time.  It's tricky to get it all in... but possible!

The things we do for our students (and our blog)... you can see my sample below!  I did "Goldilocks" because we didn't study that story so, my hope is, it will give them an example without mucking up their thoughts so they can still be original!

Best of all this project is helping us assess a ton of Common Core ELA Standards... RL 3.2 to re-tell,  RL 3.9 as it's part of our genre study, SL 3.4 and 3.5, creating a visual project, and the script writing part is using quotations in dialouge which is L3.2c.

I'm hoping these will finish on Tuesday, since they'll only be recording for 90 seconds.

We'll also be doing plays from this Scholastic Fractured Fairy Tale book:

There are 4 3rd grade classes, so each class will be learning the same play in 4 small groups.  On Thursday, each teacher will get one of the groups from each class and each group will perform for one another!

While that is going on in two rooms, the other two rooms will be having a fairy tale scavenger hunt around the school!

And before the plays and scavenger hunt on Thursday, we're having a Three Bears' Breakfast.  This is something I always did when I taught 2nd grade, so I am so happy that my new 3rd grade team was willing to help me continue this fun tradition!

We'll be eating oatmeal, fruit, and toast and drinking milk and juice while watching a few short fairy tale videos off United Streaming.  After that, it's plays, scavenger hunt, and then students get a choice of a fairy tale movie to watch in the afternoon.  It's also our last day before a 5-day mid-winter break, so it's a perfect send off to a long weekend!

The kiddos are so excited about this day, and I LOVE all of the learning that has taken place over the last two weeks of this study and that will continue to take place this coming week.  We've done theme (which they *SO* understand... I'm a happy gal!), compare and contrast characters, settings, etc..., summarizing, and tons of other learning too!  Teaching through genre is so fun!!!

A Peek at our Week!

This week has flown by!  I can't believe tomorrow is Friday already!  We're "boom-booming" for snow already... we're under a winter weather advisory until tomorrow morning.  BOOM BOOM!

So, here's what we've been working on...

I'm doing THEME with my small groups this week and they are really getting it!  It makes a teacher's heart happy!  We did this graphic organizer from my Graphic Organizers for Big Kids pack and it really helped them process their thinking.  The books from our reading series were perfect for theme this week and it fit in so well with our whole class learning as we'll start talking about theme next week!

One of my sweeties wrote in the last box (So the author really wants me to know that...), "You should never fight evil with evil.  And I mean never.  And if someone is mean to you, you should be nice to them.  Always.  And I mean always."  He filed his paper away before I thought to snap a picture, but I had a huge laugh on the inside!

Whole group, we're doing a fairy tale genre study to help us compare and contrast the themes, settings, and plots of stories with similar characters.  Here's the chart we're making- each student is making their own too.

And we're also studying linking verbs.  Today we played Dino Race and had a fun time!

 

Hope your week is flying by too... TGIF... T!

Three Bears' Breakfast & Fairy Tale Fun!

Yesterday was our annual "Three Bears' Breakfast" and we had so much fun!

After my hilarious pre-April Fool's Day joke yesterday, my students joined another 2nd grade class in the cafeteria for the breakfast.  We had an amazing spread of fresh fruit, OJ, toast, and (of course!) oatmeal.  We made sure it wasn't too hot or too cold, but juuuust right!

After the breakfast, we headed back to my room and I read them the story Glass Slipper, Gold Sandal which is a super cool Cinderella story that tells the story of Cinderella by weaving together Cinderella stories from around the world.  It's a must have for any fairy tale study!

Then we broke into groups of three and went on a fairy tale scavenger hunt around the school.  Each group got a card with 5 items on it and the items represented a fairy tale.  After gathering their items, they had to present them to their teacher and tell which fairy tale they stood for.  It was SO fun!  One of my groups got a teacher's shoe for one of their items (for Cinderella) and couldn't wait to come and show me their REAL shoe!  Another group, for Hansel and Gretel, got a real boy from a classroom!  :)

These girlies have a clock, rag, pumpkin, and a shoe... which fairy tale do they have?

It was super fun!

After that, each of us showed a different fairy tale movie and the kids got to pick which one they wanted to see.

We had a great day!

You can grab the scavenger hunt clues here!  And I have a few more free files on my classroom website, including the unit outline for the genre study!