H....is for Hibernation

Our letter study will soon be coming to a close. It is hard to believe our school year is close to half way over! This week's focus letters were Jj and Hh. With the weather turning colder  it has been a perfect time to talk about bears and hibernation!
We began our unit on Monday by activating our prior knowledge:
What do we already know about bears?  

As always, I was surprised by the amount of correct information the students already knew. I think my favorite is the first one-"They take picnic baskets".
On Tuesday, I introduced the concept of "Fantasy" and "Reality".  We began the day by doing a simple exercise of determining if the pictures were real(reality) or not real(fantasy) and just getting them used to the new terminology.  When I introduce a new "big" word we refer to that as "the FANCY way to say it" and we all hold our pinkies in the air.  So, our new FANCY word for the week was fantasy.
We then read a non-fiction book on bears and compared that to our background knowledge.
On Wednesday, we continued our bear study by categorizing what we had learned into three categories:
Bears can, Bears are, and Bears have

We then read a  fantasy book titled Bear Feels Sick and did a comprehension exercise that I loved!

  We took a piece of plain, white paper and made a trifold. This gave us beginning, middle, and end columns to retell the story.  We brainstormed as a group different ideas we remembered from the book.

Thursday was the day I couldn't wait for--Hibernation Day!! I am not sure if it was because we had something to look forward to or the simple fact I could wear my jammies!  We wrote in our journals about a time when we were sick.  I am constantly amazed at how well these kids do!

                                                               "I was sick on a school day."

                                                                "I was sick at preschool."

                                                          "I was sick when I was five."
                              I thought this was adorable as this student traced their hand and five finger.
Finally, we ate a large snack and settled in for a long afternoon nap....not really! We crawled into our caves (and by caves I mean under our tables) with our blankets, books, and fellow bears.