Diving Into Fairy Tales

Welcome back from vacation! We have spent the last two days diving into and getting to know various fairy tales so we can begin preparing for our Fairy Tale Wax Museum on April 6th! Forms are being sent home today to provide more information about the unit. On the form, students are asked to list their top three character choices for the wax museum. These choices must be returned by Monday, March 13th. Students will be notified about which character they will portray on or before Monday so they have plenty of time to prepare at home and in class for our big day!

Need some inspiration? Here is a list of fairy tales your child might like to explore:

Aladdin 

Alice in Wonderland 

Beauty and the Beast 

Chicken Little 

Cinderella 

Goldilocks and the Three Bears 

Hansel and Gretel 

Jack and the Beanstalk 

Little Red Riding Hood 

Peter Pan 

Pinocchio 

Rapunzel 

Rip Van Winkle 

Rumpelstiltskin 

Shrek 

Sleeping Beauty 

Snow White 

The Boy Who Cried Wolf 

The Elves and the Shoemaker 

The Emperor’s New Clothes 

The Frog Prince 

The Gingerbread Man 

The Little Mermaid 

The Little Red Hen 

The Princess and the Pea 

The Three Billy Goats Gruff 

The Three Little Pigs 

The Ugly Duckling 

Thumbelina 

Tom Thumb

While almost all of these tales are available in our classroom, there are also lots of different versions of these stories in our school library as well as the Wiggin Memorial Library. Students are more than welcome to choose ANY main character from any fairy tale they have read before. Some may end up being different characters from the same fairy tale, so it is important for us to know which character they would like to be from the story. You can check out some of our fairy tale characters from past years by clicking here!

Nonfiction Celebrations

Over the last two months, the giraffes have been reading and writing all sorts of nonfiction books! We learned that the purpose of a nonfiction book is to teach us true facts. Some fiction books can have true facts in them, but ALL the facts in a nonfiction book are true. 

While reading nonfiction books, we learned the lingo behind different topics, wrote down facts we learned and added to those facts by reading multiple books about the same topic. We also asked and researched questions about our different topics to learn more! After finding many facts, we chose our most interesting ones to share in our very own Weird But True video:

The first nonfiction books we created were our Who Am I? booklets. Each giraffe chose an animal to research, and painted a close-up of that animal's skin, a close-up of their eye, and then a full picture of the animal. The first two pictures were accompanied by 6 clues about that animal to help the reader guess which animal it was, and finally the full animal picture was accompanied by an acrostic poem about the animal. 

Can you guess what these animals are based on their eyes and their clues??

Answer: Elephant

Answer: Cat

Answer: Rattlesnake

After doing our animal research, we used our knowledge about nonfiction text features to create our Expert Project books! We wrote about topics that we already knew a lot about, such as dogs, cats, girl scouts, gymnastics, karate, The White Mountains, along with many others! Our books had everything from maps, diagrams, a table of contents, glossaries,  and even how-to guides! 

We all got to check out everyone's amazing books before our gingerbread decorating party and compliment them on our favorite parts! 

We can't wait to share our books with our families and learn more awesome facts from nonfiction books! 

Halloween Spooky Read!

We had lots of fun celebrating Halloween on Tuesday with our friends and family! We started off the day with some fun with the Elephant class and then we got to decorate our pumpkins!

We even got a special visit from Ms. Megan and her new puppy! 

That afternoon, many of our family members joined us for our Halloween Spooky Read. We enjoyed lots of different treats while we listened to some scary tunes

Then, it was LIGHTS OUT! For our Spooky Flashlight Read!

It was so much fun to cuddle up with a good book alongside our friends and families. Thank you to all of those who were able to bring food, drinks, and party supplies as well as those who were able to take time out of their busy schedules to join us. 

Happy Halloween to all!