Spiders!

We have been learning about spiders this week.  I love this unit!  I think spiders are so interesting and the kids love learning about them.  I start my unit by finding out what the kids already know about spiders.  The idea for this chart came from the book, Teaching with Intention by Debbie Miller.  I asked the kids what schema they have for spiders and I wrote it on  a  pink post it note and attached it to our chart under Our Schema (what we think we know).  As we learned about spiders we wrote Our New Learning on a green post it note and added it to the Chart.  Sometimes our new learning gets tagged onto our schema (see the green and pink notes that are attached to each other by clicking on the picture to blow it up) and sometimes we find out what we thought we knew is actually a misconception and we move it to the misconceptions box. 

We read our big book, The Very Busy Spider and circled our popcorn words. 

                                We read lots of poems and our favorite one uses our names!

We read, Little Miss Muffet  and created our own rhymes. 

This one says, Little Miss Molly sat on a dolly.

We learned a lot of new vocabulary words during this unit.  One of the words we learned was camouflage.  To check their understanding of the word I gave them a colored spider and they drew a picture in their Science Journals to illustrate the word.

In Math we made a Spider glyph and analyzed and graphed our data.  We turned our Spider glyph into a   headband so that we could wear it when we did our cool Spider Bite experiment.  This experiment helped us find out the answer to the question, How do spiders eat their prey?

We have another science experiment and a few more activities that we are doing tomorrow.  I will post the pictures this weekend.  A lot of the activities and patterns for this unit are featured in my Spiders unit which is on Teachers pay Teachers.