Abenaki & Holiday Poems

In this last week before break, I'm trying to cram in some more Social Studies. We rotate through Science, and at the start of each quarter, we get a new class. We have that class for 20 days/lessons, so no Social Studies during that time.

I've already covered our state symbols, government and map skills. I'm focusing a little more on our state history, learning about the Abenaki (our Native American tribe up here), which will morph into Explorers, Colonial Life and then the American Revolution (yay!) (This is much more interesting than last year, when it was just our state history and regions :).

So I'm trying to squeeze in the Abenaki this week, with us finishing on Friday, so I can start Explorers before they come back and the next Science switch happens in the last week of January.

So I got my creative on, and decided that we would make lapbooks!

I didn't make labels...I let the kids decorate their own!

The middle has our state map with the names of the tribes and their 'areas' colored in

Left side

Right side

What I did was take our book and divide it up into sections. The lessons in the book also thoughtfully divided up the 'big ideas' into smaller focuses, which helped me create the foldables.

This kids seem to really be enjoying this! (and the freedom I've given them) I'm having them take notes on each section, and put their notes in the foldables.

Today we also started our Holiday Sensory Poems, which I got from Nicole Shelby.

   

We started by brainstorming a list of things that we thought of when we thought of the holiday. 

Sorry for the blurry/glarey quality

The kids started their first drafts today, and tomorrow we'll look at them and revise to add in more 'pretty' language :)

Yesterday's Outfit

Sweater & Tank: Target

Pants: JCPenny

Shoes: Endless

Tomorrow I am planning an outfit post of sparkly goodness! I have four outfits that have some sort of sparkle to them, three that I have worn to holiday parties (or attempted parties...our staff party was Friday, and was rescheduled for tomorrow). So no judgement on repeats, I promise to style them differently! ;)

Smiles and Sunshine,

Kaitlyn