Brown Turkey, Brown Turkey and a Freebie

     Even my second graders who have heard Brown Bear, Brown Bear and the other similar books since kindergarten still love them!  Early on in the year we read Baby Bear, Baby Bear and then created our own class book called Second Grader, Second Grader.  This is a great beginning of the year activity and helps students learn each others names.  Click on the picture below to download your freebie of this class book page.

      To continue the fun, I created a Thanksgiving version of Brown Bear, Brown Bear to read with my students.  I also included a black and white smaller version to use with students in guided reading.  This book would be great for students working on reading color words, other sight words, and books with predictable text.  To download the full page color version along with the half-page black and white student version, click on any of the pictures below.  To see all of the pages, download the preview file by clicking on any of the pictures to get to my Teacher's Notebook store page.

How cute is this little pilgrim?!?

         I hope you can use this great story with your kiddos!  

         On an election day note, my students were so darn funny today!  We had an election in our classroom and used the awesome freebie mini-unit from Katie Knight of Teacher to the Core.  We voted on the secret ballots and tallied up the results.  Romney won 12-11.  Tight race...;)  Later this week I'll post pics of their writing about what they would do if they were president.  

       We had to have a chat about being respectful of all people's opinions, even when they're different from our own.  It fit in perfectly with our unit "It's All About Culture" that we began this week.  More to come on that later...

       Happy hump day tomorrow!!

Martin Luther King Jr...better late than never!

So, I know that I am almost a month late on this post but I wanted to share a couple of quick and easy ways to teach about Martin Luther King Jr. through literacy.  If nothing else, you can pin it :) and save the ideas for next year.

In my second grade class, we started out by building our background knowledge about MLK Jr.'s life through some read alouds.  Here are a few that I used/would recommend:

During the read alouds, we payed attention to when we learned something new about him and recorded on our graphic organizer.

Finally, we made text-to-self connections and thought about how the stories we read about Dr. MLK Jr. reminded us of our own lives.  We turned those connections into a class book.

Here's the cover of our book.

To get this freebie for your own class, click here.

Here are a few of the pages from our book:

"I am like Martin Luther King Jr. because he likes

to the right thing.  And, I agree with his dream!"

"I am like Martin Luther King Jr. because I care about all
the people in the world and I want freedom!"

"I am like Martin Luther King Jr. because I like love.
I love black people and white people."

"I'm like Martin Luther King Jr. because I love everyone
no matter who they are! Even when they disappoint me.
No matter what!"

Please leave a comment and let me know if you try one of these ideas...or share what you do to teach MLK Jr. through literacy!