Dinosaurs, Summarizing, and more!

      I love dinosaurs and so do the kiddos. We use Scott Foresman Reading Street and last week our story was The Big Circle.  This is a story about a group of Triceratops that are being attacked by a T. Rex.  The Triceratops create a circle to protect their young.  While the Scott Foresman series focuses on sequencing and reviewing summarizing during this story, our county has units of study that we are following.  The unit we just began is about Characters.   We are working hard to not just look at sequencing and summarizing, but looking at the characters in that sequence and determine how those characters grow and change throughout the story.  In this story, the students were able to see how the T. Rex changes his plans because of the bravery of the herd of triceratops.  

      We used a great summarizing sheet to help us organize our ideas about the dinosaurs.  You can click on the picture below to go to Mrs. Bainbridg'e blog and get your copy for free.  This can be used with so many different stories.

We also used visualizing as a way to really "see" the characters in the story.  I am loving our reading response journals and the entries that my students are adding.  They show their learning and thinking.  Here are two examples of visualizing that we did with the story The Big Circle, last week!  Above is the picture of the T.Rex coming toward the circle.  The big Triceratops are on the outside towards the T.Rex and below is a picture of the T.Rex chasing the baby back to it's family. 

    

     Just for a little word work fun, we made words with Dinosaur Boggle and used contractions in our writing with a Dinosaur Contraction activity.  You can find my dinosaur contractions over at my TpT store. Also, you can click here to find my dinosaur boggle for free! 

Dinosaur Contractions- This packet has contractions for will, am, and not.  The students match the two dinosaurs that go together to make a contraction and then record them on the recording sheet.  The students then choose three contractions to use in a sentence.  My kiddos did a great job with this last week!

Free Dinosaur Boggle!  Don't forget to grab it today!  If you download it, please let me know what you think about it! Thanks!  

     Don't forget that all of my Thanksgiving items are on sale at my Teachers Pay Teacher store!  They will be on sale through tomorrow!

Michelle