Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus

Today we began our first author study, Mo Willems! He is one of my favorite children's authors of all time! We began by reading his award winning and interactive book, "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus." The kids loved saying "No" every time the pigeon pleaded with them to drive the bus. We then brainstormed a list of things the pigeon should not drive. I was impressed with the list the kids came up with! We followed this up with a short video from Mo himself talking about the writing process and how he gets his ideas for characters. Next, we did a direct to draw of the famous pigeon. I just LOVE how these turned out!! The kids then filled in a template that I created stating what the pigeon should not drive and why. This is our first attempt at persuasive writing. At this point in first grade we are focusing on getting our ideas on paper and phonemic spelling (sounding out the words). They did an amazing job and were very creative! A couple examples are, "Don't let the pigeon drive the taxi because he can't reach the pedals," "Don't let the pigeon drive a BMW because he might push the wrong buttons," and "don't let the pigeon drive the pizza car because he might eat all the pizza." We finished up with sharing all our stories and hanging our work on the bulletin board. I will turn this into a class book in a couple of weeks. Such a fun lesson!!

The Napping House

Today we read The Napping House by Audrey Wood. This is by far one of my favorite children's books! There is so much teaching you can do with this book and the illustrations are beautiful! The kids love predicting which character will join the slumber party next. They also enjoy watching the night fall turn to morning throughout the story.
After reading the story today, we ordered the story by sequence of events. Then we estimated how many feet were in the bed altogether. After a few estimations, we began to count them using a "counting on" method. We finished by writing out the number equation.
The students then made their own "Napping Houses" and figured out how many feet are in their house. We finished the lesson with a graph representing their answers.