Monday, March 21, 2011

Circle Story Week

Hopefully your 1st grader came home each night last week and told you all about the fun things we did with many of the circle stories written by Laura Joffe Numeroff.

  We began our circle story unit on Monday by reading If You Give A Mouse A Cookie.circle story 1

To learn more about what a circle story was were all assigned one sentence from the book.  We had to write our sentence and illustrate it.  Then we worked together as a class to sequence the events and put our pages together to make a class book.  This allowed us to see how a circle story works and how one event triggers the next event.  Then we made cute mouse art projects.

On Tuesday we read two more circle stories and wrote real and fantasy sentences about pigs.circle story 2

On Wednesday we read If You Give A Moose A Muffin and focused our attention on the story elements.  We used a muffin shaped graphic organizer to write about the main character and setting.  Then we choose one problem from the story and wrote about how it was resolved.

circle story 3

We also read If You Take A Mouse to School and made a math themed book about all the things a mouse might do in our classroom.  He did addition and subtraction problems, solved story problems, identified shapes and ordered numbers. 

Then we made a circle story of our own called If You Give A First Grader A Book.  Students had to finish the writing prompts on each page and draw pictures to illustrate their words.circle story 4

On Thursday we finished up our week of circle stories by reading If You Give A Cat A Cupcake and doing a sequencing activity using events from the story.circle story 5

All week long we did center activities that were inspired by Laura Numeroff’s circle stories.circle story 6

Our final project of the week was creating a circle story of our own.  After all of the experiences we had with stories like this throughout the week everyone was ready to write.  They used a graphic organizer to plan their story and then wrote it modeling it after the format of the ones we had read this week.circle story 7circle story 8

   As you can see we had an a very FUN week in 1st grade!!!

When we return from Spring Break we will be welcoming Spring and learning all about weather.

If you are a K-State fan . . . you better stop reading now . . . because I just found one last picture from last week that I HAD to post . . . I {sort of} promised my little twin that I would!!! 

We both wore our {new} shirts to school on St. Patrick’s Day to show our Jayhawks some LOVE!!!DSCN4582

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

hello,
I really like your "if you give a cat a cupcake" activity...where did you find the pictures that you used on the cupcake to sequence?

Jenny said...

These activities are great. I found you through Pinterest. Where did you get all your activities and centers? Love them!!!

Jenny Futch
jfutch@long.k12.ga.us

Anonymous said...

Where did you get your activities? They are so cute!

Anonymous said...

rachel.uffer@palmbeachschools.org- please email me, so I can use these too!

Anonymous said...

I would really like to use the little books you created to teach about circular stories. We are going to have a book club morning about this style of story. May I use your printed books? Please email me. estherludlow@comcast.net.

Rhonda Gadino said...

Would love to have your resources to use for these books? Where did you get them?

rbeckett@nkcschools.org

marsha sullivan said...

I don't see any answers to the questions about getting your worksheets etc. I would like to use them too. I have the First Graders book from Penterest, but would love to see your center sheets or be able to copy them.
msullivan@fcsd.wnyric.org

Anonymous said...

I am doing a Laura Numeroff author study for the next few weeks and would love to have my kids write a your circle story. If you are willing to share anything with me I would appreciate it. I tried to find you on TPT, but did not see any account for you.

Nichole Finn
finnn@tvsc.k12.in.us