Urban vs. Rural in the fall

Whew!  The 1st quarter was busy.  We just wrapped up a ginormous unit on urban and rural communities in the fall.  It was a lot of work getting everything coordinated but I am so so happy to be back to teaching in integrated units.  It just makes more sense to the kids when there's an overriding theme that everything is connected to - as opposed to remembering one thing for writing, then abruptly moving to math, then moving to another disconnected topic for science, etc.

As we learned about urban and rural communities, we studied plants and animals in science.  We focused mainly on life cycles and plant & animal needs.

How cute are these farm animal projects that the kindergarten teachers did?!

In social studies we talked about why we need farms and how things from the farms are harvested to be made ready to go to the grocery store and eventually our houses.  We also touched a little on wants and needs and how they're different in each community.

Venn Diagram from Mrs. Russell's room

Flip book: what we get from animals (ex: milk from a cow)

We wrote about exploring fall through our five senses and the life cycle of pumpkins.  We also went to the farm and wrote about what we did and saw there.

I feel chilly.

I taste nachos as the football game.

I hear cutting the pumpkin.

We ended our unit with group research projects.  The kids chose farm animals they wanted to learn about and we watched video clips and read non-fiction books to make notes in our notebooks.  Then they chose their favorite fact to write a sentence and illustrate.  I took videos of their presentations and hooked them up to Aurasma - our parents are going to flip out at Open House next week when they see our work come to life!!  :)