James and the Giant Peach

We've been really digging into this treasured read aloud!  Along the way we have been sharpening our skills and doing lots of fun things to bring this book to life.   I'm going to try to keep this short and sweet because, well, its 7:00 on a Tuesday and this teacher is certainly ready to unplug for the evening.  :)

Peach art for our front covers, discussing the novel's characters, setting, problem, and solution, analyzing James' character traits, and comparing and contrasting Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker.

We also taste tested real peaches and peach candy.  Then created a Venn diagram to share our data.

I can't seem to get these pictures to rotate tonight.  I hope you can see from this sideways view!

Have a lovely evening all!

More Fun with James and the Giant Peach

We are so enjoying reading this great novel in class, and I have been tying it into our curriculum wherever it fits!  Since Centipede has become one of our favorite characters I decided to have the students create a "Super-Sentence-O-Pede" to help us learn lots of key grammar concepts.  Here is what we have done so far...

The top hat stands for capital letters at the beginning of each sentence, the face reminds us about end punctuation, the red body is all about nouns, and the yellow body is all about adjectives.  We will continue to work on these concepts for the rest of the week and the following week as well.  Then we will add on verbs, adverbs, and finally prepositional phrases.  He is sure to be an awesome resource, and he might even end up being as tall as the kids!  Ha!  We are strategically laying the foundation for powerful sentences brick by brick, and having lots of fun learning too. :)

We also played an engaging game matching up some of the characters with their character traits.  The kiddos worked in teams to complete this and then they shared their answers with the class for table points.  Check out this participation level, the stuff teachers dream of!  I just had to snap a picture!  However, in order to receive the points, we really upped the ante, the team had to share evidence from the book that supported their choice.  I was sure impressed by my little scholars!

On Friday we are going to tie in some science and use the scientific method to guide us in conducting a peach experiment.  Look for more updates to come!

James and the Giant Peach

Oh boy have we ever been enjoying this fantastic novel!  To accompany my read aloud during class we have been really diving into the book with some fun activities.  Here's what we have been up to!

Of course we had to make some art to kick off our read aloud. :)

We then discussed James the main character and wrote down his character traits in the beginning of the story.  Our hearts were bleeding for poor sweet James... :(

Then we compared and contrasted his two terrible aunts!

Next we created a story map.  We must read on to find out the solution, or as one second grader said the happy ending. <3

In math we were learning about graphs and fractional parts, soooo I just had to tie it all in.  First I demonstrated fractional parts by cutting into some juicy peaches.  Then  I gave each kiddo 4 peaches.  Our mission was to cut our peaches into halves, thirds, and fourths.  We kept one as a whole.

Next we taste tested peaches and peach rings and collected our favorites in a venn diagram. 

A juicy fun time was had by all!