Flashback...Spiders and Bats

Hi friends! It's a beautiful day here, so I am having a flashback post today! 
And did you hear the news? TPT has reached 100,000 Facebook fans and is throwing a flash sale. To join in on the celebration, I have put my whole store on sale for an additional 20% off! Clear those wishlists while you can, the sale ends Monday night at midnight. 

Spiders, spiders, and more spiders! While I love teaching about spiders, I am burnout on them this year.  One week of plans turned into two weeks since my kids were loving learning all about spiders!

We started out with a reading of The Spider and The Fly by Tony DiTerlizzi. My kids always love this book. We created a story map together. 

Then I led into informational text about spiders. We began with our wonderings. Each student was sent off to record 2 things they wondered about spiders. We charted our wonderings.

At the end of the two weeks, the students wrote what they learned. We added this to our anchor chart.

This was our first attempt at wondering and learning. It really gave me a glimpse of where my students' thinking was and where we need some guiding. 

We read a bunch of books on spiders and viewed some videos. They just could not get enough! 

I had to bring the spiders into math. Since we had been working on part-part-whole (and I failed to find enough plastic spiders to use as manipulatives), I had the students cut and color this cute little spider to use. The first two days, the students used them with mats.

On the third day, they had to create their own addition sentences using dice and the spiders. 

I also introduced graphing with the spider theme.

We compared narrative text and informational text. I was really surprised at the comparisons my students were able to make, all on their own!

As always, we had to complete a Can-Have-Are organizer. 

 I love that while the students were able to use the group chart for information, several kids wrote about things they learned that really stuck with them. Of course, I don't have a picture of those ones! 

The students took all of their learning and compiled it into a written piece. 

It has definitely been a webbed out theme on spiders! You can grab some freebies I created last year here. Or you can check out the revised unit here. 

Now we are Going Batty!