Planning for January

Happy First of January!!  

Can't believe it's time to start planning for January already, can you??!!

Here are some of my favorite themes, lessons, and ideas I like to do for January. 

First I start with New Year's and Snowmen....

The first few days we get back, we talked about our goals for the new year. 

I like reading THIS book as our lesson starter.

We just wrote them on our "quick writes" paper.

I also have them do an old Scholastic News article and this cute little craft - which perfect for taking up time! lol. I just have them trace the hat, I will write the year in the middle, and then they have the freedom to decorate their hats however they want. 

And since we were going to have Monday off for Martin Luther King Day, we talked about how it's okay to be different. I really like to focus on accepting everyone, not just people of other colors.  Todd Parr's book is one of my favorites to talk about this.  

The book class book we wrote comes from my January Class Books Set. My class loves writing class books. Take a look at this post to see more ideas for class books.

Another favorite activity we did comes from Christina, HERE.  We read the book Snow Dream, and we focused on using clues... a lot of inferencing with this activity!

We also used the Snowmen Books to help us with our writing that week. After we read a few of the books, we brainstormed ideas on what they could do with their snowman. Then, we did the planning page and wrote it out as a paragraph. 

I really want them to start focusing on topic, details, and closing, so I had them use a crayon to underline their topic (green), details (highlighting the transition words in yellow), and closing (red). 

After they finished their writing and illustrating, they did the snowman craft to go along with it. It's a non-tracer craft. They are getting so good with those! 

That was the first week. 

Our 2nd week back, we move on to Penguins... We reviewed prepositions (with my stellar chart anchor chart that I forgot to take a picture of, but it was something like my Turkey Preposition chart HERE),

 then they did their Penguin Adventure book. 

It's a freebie! :) 

Grab it HERE

Also - every theme we always start with making our folder for it. We make a header for the folder and then they do a directed drawing for the cover. I always love how different they turn out!

They really make it their own!

The first week, we focus on Tacky!

We did some summarizing. The kids said that they thought "Then" worked better, the way we were wording the summary, so we changed it on the form. Sure! Why not? Right?

They took the planning page and turned it into a paragraph writing.

We also compared Tacky to his friends and did a cute craft to go with it!

After reading a few of the books, we did a little character analyzing....

Next week, we'll still be doing penguins, but we're moving to nonfiction!

The kids will be doing their own research on PebbleGo and creating their own book!

I always love watching their first research book come together! 

Here's a preview of what's included in the Learning with Penguins unit.

Sometimes, depending on where we're at in our technology skills, I have them do a Google Slide on their penguin research. 

Check out this video

And finally, if we have time in our month - or at least an extra week, we do a unit on Predator and Prey in the arctic. I use an OLD Scholastic News for this and some ReadWorks articles - and the kids LOVE it. 

In addition to my PENGUIN packs - here are a few other things I have planned for January! 

Hope you have a wonderful rest of your break!