I LOVE apple week because it just finally feels like my year is started and I am not teaching procedures all day everyday.
For me, the easiest way to incorporate a theme and some fun into my daily lessons starts with my weekly poem. I have a simple little routine I follow each week.
Monday-Read aloud and discuss the theme/title
Tuesday-Use highlighting tape to find whatever writing conventions we are covering
Wednesday-Use post its to find different grammar things (nouns, verbs, adjectives)
Thursday- Review and read aloud
Friday-We glue a half sheet copy of the poem into our poetry notebooks and highlight something we talked about in whole group and decorate.
The kiddos LOVE that they keep their poetry notebook in their book basket/box so they can read them during read to self.
During any theme week, I have to make sure I incorporate any theme activities into the TEKS I have to cover that week. This week I needed to teach story structure/elements, adjectives, and inferencing. It is a ton to cover in first grade, but we introduce all the concepts pretty quickly in the first nine weeks and then cover each one more in-depth throughout the rest of the year. To kick off apple week, we read Apple Trouble to introduce the concept of story structure. The problem just gets worse and worse in the story and is finally solved in an easy way. It made it super easy for the firsties to understand problem & solution.
We retold and reread the story a couple more times during the first few days of the week and then the kiddos then filled out this story structure map as an assessment on Wednesday.
The real fun started on Thursday and Friday. My district does 'prime time' each morning for thirty minutes. It is when everyone drops everything and teaches reading, even the math teachers! I normally have a little routine that we do for phonics, sight words, and little decodable readers just during that time each morning, but for apple week my sweet student teacher read the students Applebet the ABC book.
They loved it! The kids each then made a personalized book page for the letter of their first name!
We also read one of my favorites, "The Apple Pie Tree" by Zoe Hall and reviewed story structure.
We did sequence of events last week, so to keep that fresh in our schema, we did a quick cut and paste activity after reading this book. It turned out super cute for only taking about ten minutes!
We spent the last two weeks talking about nouns and verbs so this week we needed to introduce adjectives. We read Fancy Nancy's Apple book to find some fancy words for our adjective apple anchor chart.
I found the big apple adjectives chart on pintrest, there are a million versions but here is mine. I only teach reading so I usually try to laminate and use dry erase or use post its so both classes can have a fresh anchor chart!
The kiddos then made a smaller version of the chart but I forgot to take a picture (it was the last activity of the day on a friday!)
I adore these "Let's write about ____" in this case, apples, by
Latoya Reed. I think I have every theme she has available except maybe one or two! I set up the words and the writing papers from the packs in my writing center that the kids can go to during work on writing during Daily 5.
Here's a sample writing from one of my cuties! I love the paper she puts in the packs!
The big event was the apple tasting and favorites graphing! I did not go all out and make applesauce or any those things this year! I just did not have time! Here is a couple shots of the tasting and the graph that followed! So much fun!
They LOST IT when I had to start taping the green ones above the white board! Too funny!
Some cuties trying to pick their favorite flavor!
We also did a quick segment on the parts and some apple vocabulary, I can't take too much time with these topics because I don't teach science or math!
That's a wrap for apple week in first grade! I am already ready for pumpkins! :)
