We spent the last few weeks learning about ocean animals. I focused on one animal every two days. I love to incorporate science into my reading and writing lessons. Here are some of the activities that my kindergarten student completed.
Before we began each animal, we created a sticky note "what we already know" chart.
After we read a few nonfiction texts about our animal of the day, the kids helped me create can/have/are charts. These charts helped us organize our information.
We then took information from our can/have/are charts and applied the information in our writing. My students wrote one fact from the can column, one fact from the have column, and one fact from the are column.
We practiced making connections as we looked at slides from the animal slideshows that I created.
We love music in my kindergarten classroom! I wrote these animal fact songs to teach us about our animal of the day. After singing the song a few times, we practiced finding our sight words in the song.
We read reading passages about each animal. After reading the passages, the students wrote a fact of their own. I love to share the pen with my kids. This student is modeling her fact for the rest of the class.
We graphed goldfish!
We sang this ocean themed song. After singing the song, my kids helped me fill in the missing words. We then changed some of the words with sticky notes to other words that make sense.
Our big writing project during the unit was this ocean animals book. We wrote about each animal as we learned about it.
We graphed our favorite ocean animal!
We created this animal investigation. We learned about nonfiction text features such as captions, flow charts, and maps.
We made these ocean animal crafts as we learned about each animal. I placed them in my daily 5 rotations and the kids completed them while I completed my guided reading lessons.
I created slides to use as an introduction to each animal.
We labeled each ocean animal.
We created ocean animal flip books.
The last animal we learned about was the jellyfish. We created these jellyfish fact books. The students attached streamers and yarn to them for the tentacles and stingers.
