We began our unit by discussing farmers. We made a class bubble map writing words and drawing pictures to describe what they do, what they wear, and what they work with. Students then completed their own bubble maps, sounding out words and/ or drawing pictures. I encouraged students to come up with their own ideas, instead of copying down the ones we wrote together. Check out some of their work!
I was so excited when I saw my students stretching out their words! I was even more excited when I saw that some that only drew pictures went back and tried to write words! They are doing amazing!
After discussing farmers, we moved on to pigs. I decided to have them label a pig as a work on writing activity during our reading center rotations. I started by making a larger version of our pig on chart paper and we discussed the different parts of a pig.
We began by sounding out the words in the word bank and then we set out to label. I left this chart posted in our classroom, so my kids could reference it if they needed to. They worked on labeling and coloring their own pigs during centers, then I made a bulletin board display of their hard work!
Didn't they come out cute!
The last animal that we studied during our farm unit was cows! Our curriculum map has us working on informative and explanatory writing in the fall, so we do a lot of, "Can, Have, Are" writing. This time I decided to have students complete a planning page and a final draft page. On the planning page, students wrote down one idea each for can, have, and are. We completed this together as it was our first time using this format.
We then took these ideas and transferred them to our final copy paper, where we worked on writing complete sentences. I used a tracing font to start the sentences, so my students just had to fill in the can, have, and are. It was a good way for us to discuss what does and does not sound like a complete sentence. We also reviewed the importance of spaces between our words and punctuation!
Some of my lower kiddos had trouble identifying what words to write and where to write them, so I used a highlighter to mark their papers. This helped immensely! I was so proud to see that they were all able to copy from near point and far point! It can be a difficult skill to learn. My students' cow writing came out so awesome that I decided to display it across from our pigs.
It's a little difficult to see in the picture, but trust me, it looks so cute!
I wish we could have spent more time on this unit, both my students and myself ADORED it! There are so many other animals that we could have studied and so many more fun activities we could have done! You can check out my, "Writing on the Farm" unit by clicking HERE. There are graphic organizers and writing pages for all kinds of farm animals! You can also pick up my, "Counting on the Farm" book for FREE!
-Mrs. O
