Stellaluna Obsessed!

Don't you just love the book Stellaluna? I sure do! Each year, I make little things, here and there for the book and this year, I finally went all in and finished my Stellaluna Unit! It's easy prep and fun to teach! It includes some math, literacy, writing and a little stem experiment! Better yet, you don't have to buy anything to go along with the unit (my favorite part)!

Here's a peek at our fun with Stellaluna this week!

First, we started off by reading the book! If you don't own it, you can find it here to play online.

After, we read the book, we filled out an anchor chart and pulled out some story elements. On the first day, we discussed the setting pretty heavily. This is because on the graphic organizer, I didn't just want students to tell me what the setting was, but I wanted them to tell me HOW they knew that was the setting.

For the rest of the week, we discussed the story elements even further. Here is a problem and solution example!

I am so proud of how they're explaining themselves!

Something else we worked on was short vowel words. Students got smalls square letters to cut out and a bat mat.

Then, each time they made a word, they read it and wrote it,

This little sweetie caught on quick, to stick with a word family!

After we did this whole group, I stuck it at word work for the week! This is one that can be done again and again!

We completed a few math activities!

This week, we worked a lot on finding missing addends.

We also did a write the room activity to get the kids up and moving around!

On the activity seen below, they used their bats in their ten frame on their paper to find the missing addend.

Then, one of my favorite activities we did this week was a stem one! It was a last minute idea I got when we were listening to the book being read to us online.

In the book it says, "Stellaluna could not fly because her wings were like wet paper."

So... I thought... let's test that out and see what it means!?!!

SO MUCH FUN!!!

We made guesses before we tested it out. We talked about what it meant for a bat to fly 'better.'

Afterwards, students reflected on their own, then we shared out!

-It was heavier which made it fall faster.-

-It glided down slowly.-

After doing the activity, students can then complete a fun little craft to document their learning.

To put some icing on the cake for our Stellaluna week, we sang a song, read a poem and drew a picture to illustrate our learning!

Next, week we are going to be learning all about non-fiction text and learning about actual bats! EEKK!! We will be using my Text Features Unit to pull out facts and use Text Features!