Wild at Heart with Marie from ‘The Hands-On Teacher in First’!

Today, I’m sharing Marie Cote’s Wild Writing Centers!  I’ve gotten to know her through blogging and she is both sweet and knowledgeable!  You will love her! 🙂 Marie’s lessons are engaging and give plenty of opportunity for discussion and could tie in nicely with science lessons too!  Let’s jump in! 🙂

Click on this picture to go to Marie’s blog!!!

Marie’s packet includes:
-A ‘WILD’ bubble map
-A Wild vs. Tame Animal Sorting Activity
-A Wild Animal ABC Order Activity with a recording page
-Three different Wild Animal themed writing pages with space for a picture
-Three IDEA/Brainstorming pages to use with each of the writing prompt pages
-A Create your own WILD ANIMAL writing extension activity where the kids can draw a picture and add a description!

In my classroom, we do a lot of collaborative grouping and this sort give us an opportunity to have students cover common core speaking and listening standards while also working on ELA standards for sorting things by category. Let me give you an idea of what this will look like in my room when I do it with the kids in the spring…

Students working in quads.

All of my students sit in quads (groups of 4).  Each table area will get a baggie in their table bucket that has the two header cards and four animals.  The ‘table captains’ (since we have a pirate theme) will distribute the headers and picture cards.  I will review the difference between wild and tame, and then they will sort their animal and talk to each other about why they feel that animal could be described as wild or tame.  We will follow that up with the Kagan structure ‘One stray’ where one student from each table will visit a different table to learn about their sort, and then tell about what animals their table sorted.  That student goes back to their own table and discusses with their group what they learned.

Marie also offers a great ABC order activity that is differentiated! 🙂  There are three different recording pages.  One with only 10 spaces, one with 15, and the last with 20.  My students are seated at tables and grouped by their reading ability   Each table has one high student, one mid-high student, one mid-low student, and one low student, per the Kagan expectations.  Each of those categories has a reading group name.  Some weeks I have skill based groups, some weeks I do literacy groups. The kids know that when we do skill based centers they work on the package for their reading group.  My high and mid-high groups will have the larger list, the mid-lows will have the medium list and the lows have the shortest list.  It will work out great! 🙂

Thanks to my husband Chris for being my guinea pig for this  posting.  Heaven help that man…he needs to be in my handwriting class, but…he was a real trooper about it!  Wait until you see what he wrote for the next section!!

Just a lil’ Pond Writin’!

Another activity that’s in this particular pack is what I like to call, ‘Pond Writing’! 🙂  There are several activity suggestions that could work with just about any literary or informational text on ponds.  Let’s take a peek at that for just a bit before we wrap up.

I love teaching about my natural environment.  I grew up in an area with lots of ponds, and here at our school we have a few ponds as well, so the children will really get into writing about this particular part of Marie’s pack!

I selected two books for my classroom instruction this year on this topic…The one on the left is called ‘Make Way For Ducklings’…it’s one of my favorite fiction stories.  I usually teach it when I teach about maps, because it’s about a group of ducks in Boston, but I’m going to save it for this unit instead.  My informational text will be Around the Pond: Who’s Been Here…