Creepy, Crawly, Spiders!

Creepy, Crawly, Spiders, EEKK! I don't really like finding spiders in my house, but I love teaching all about spiders in my classroom.

I am super excited to be blogging today over at The Primary Punchbowl all about how I integrate learning in my class, specifically during my unit on spiders. I share lots of great ideas for Science, ELA, Writing, a Craft and of course a Snack too! Be sure to head over and check it out here!

Here, I am sharing the complete contents of my two Spider resources. You can check them out and even win a copy of each for yourself!

I know there are mixed feelings about teaching in themes, but honestly I love it. I feel it actually helps me maximize my instructional minutes by having my lessons integrate all subject areas together, rather than trying to keep everything separate. To do that I have created a Non-Fiction Spider unit incorporating Science and ELA. As well as, a Spider Literacy and Math center pack.

Studying spiders would be considered a science unit. However by focusing on reading skills, word patterns, citing evidence in the text, comprehension it is quite easy to see how it is also my literacy focus for the week. In addition, there is a big push to introduce our students to more informational text so this fits in quite nicely.

We start all our units by making anchor charts. I like to do Schema, New Learning and Misconceptions. Here is the one we made in our room.

I know some teachers like using the K, W, L model. I have included headers for both types of charts in my pack.

The next thing we do is go over our vocabulary for the unit. I have 9 vocabulary cards and journal pages to illustrate and write a sentence about each word. I also created one to use in Interactive Notebooks if that is what you are using in your room.

Going hand in hand with our vocabulary we label the parts of a spider. I have fill in diagram with the key included as well as a second version for use with INB.

In addition to reading several books about spiders,

I have created Spider fact sheets that I project on my smartboard that we read together. You can also print out these pages and put them together to make a book about spiders to use whole group or in your guided reading groups.

Then I put up the coordinating comprehension question sheet and we share the pen to answer the questions. I also incorporate a partner talk question. I have a 95% ELL population so we try to incorporate as much speaking as possible. Talking with a partner is a great way to build confidence in language development. We do then share our ideas whole group and even take a poll and graph our results.

For those of you want something on a higher level I have included 2 spider fact passages with vocabulary and comprehension questions. These can be done independently or in a guided reading group. I have students highlight the vocabulary words as we review them and use context clues to confirm their meaning. Next, they look for the answers to the comprehension questions and highlight their evidence in the text.

I have the students illustrate a Spider fact book once we have read it together during a small group session.

Finally in this pack I have included 2 emergent readers. One focusing on sight words and predictable text. The other also incorporates a review of colors and counting spiders up to 10.

If you are interest in this unit you can find it in my TpT store by clicking on any of the pictures above. It is on sale through Saturday for 20% off.

I love carrying my unit theme throughout all of my lessons. So I created this unit of Spider Literacy and Math centers. There are 5 Literacy and 5 Math activities included. Each activity has an I can... direction card and all are aligned to Common Core standards.

One of my kiddos favorite things to do is write or count the room. This pack has an activity for both writing and counting included.

There is also a rhyming center, that can be easily differentiated. Students match the rhyming cards. They can also complete a recording sheet by drawing pictures of their matches, or for my highest learners that sound out and write the words of the matches along with their pictures.

The other literacy centers included are a sentence scramble, uppercase/lowercase/picture match a sight word roll.

For the math centers this a roll and cover with 2 different levels. One just for finding the number rolled and the other they roll two dice add them together and then find the number.

There is a non-standard measuring center. Students will measure how many spiders long each spider or web is.

My kiddos love using themed erasers, and let's face it I can't pass them up at the dollar section in Target. So what do you do with them. I have Ten frames that the students complete by filling in the number on the card using those fun erasers. The numbers 1-20 are included.

The final two math activities are the Count the Room, and a number and tally mark matching game. My kiddos loved all these centers. Thus, my lack of action pictures, we were having so much fun I forgot to snap some pics, blogger fail! If you are interested in this unit you can click on any of the pictures above to go to my TpT store and it is also 20% off unit end of day Saturday.

For making it this far I have 2 goodies for you. First off a freebie to use during your spider week. We started word families in our class and I found this super cute spider activity from Susan Jones at Thank God It's First Grade.

Secondly, I a going to give away a copy of both of my Spider units to one lucky winner on Sunday October 18th at 8pm (pacific time). My son will pick a random number so just leave me a comment below telling me how you feel about spiders. Be sure to include your email so that I can send you the units if you are the winner. For a second chance to win, be sure to head over to my post all about Spiders on The Primary Punchbowl.

You still have a few days left to enter on our Fall Blog Hop to win a $25 TpT gift certificate as well as tons of other goodies too. Click here to head to that post. Have a great week friends and thanks for stopping by!