Novel Studies and Guided Reading!

Friends~I have been loving this week! We started our Bat Unit and also our Guided Reading groups. We have had such an explosion of learning in room 331:) We began our Bunnicula novel study and my students are totally begging for more. I look up often and my other students are listening in. I almost feel guilty not sharing the book with them. Take a peek at what we have been up to!

Above you will see our Novel Study folders. I run off the the cover from my Novel Study file. I mount it on construction paper to make a folder. I like to do this so that their parents know what level the book is. In the white square, you will find the Lexile and Guided Reading Level. I then copy a few of the first few chapter response sheets and vocabulary. Then I staple them into the packet. I add notebook paper to the other side as their Think Pad. That is where they record all of their THINKING while they are reading.

Here are my kiddos in action. I usually work on 2 or 3 chapters at a time. As we finish the chapters, I pull out the work and add the new chapters. They are doing an amazing job thinking while they are reading. Next week we are going to focus on generating questions. We are just at the part where Chester sees Bunnicula for the first time and the kiddos were freaking out! I made them stop reading and take it home for homework! I am sooooo rottten!

You can check out my Bunnicula unit by clicking the image below! It is a must have for the Halloween Season! Be sure to download the preview to grab a few pages for FREE! You also can preview several of my other novel studies by clicking the pictures. Each unit leads you and your students through the books with vocabulary, response sheets, and lots more. I just love how engaged they are when we are in our groups.

Below you will find another Guided Reading group. We are moving away from out text books and I am scrounging a bit for several copies of books that relate to what we are working on so I was able to pull together a set of Weekly Readers on bats. My kiddos loved learning about how other animals are similar to bats like the flying squirrel. They also loved the opportunity to record their THINKING on my dry erase table top while wearing their LASER LIGHTS pointers. Those are always a huge hit!

Speaking of similarities...did you know that Bat Wings are very similar to human hands? Their wings are made up of 4 fingers and a thumb. A thin membrane is stretched across the bones to form their wings. That is why they are such amazing flyers. They have light bones and can change direction easily! We did this cool experiment where the kiddos put baggies over their hands and compared them to a human hand. They also traced their hands and added a membrane to make a Human Bat Wing! I had them slide their diagram into their baggie and take it home to teach their families!

We also focused on baby bat pups! We did an experiment where I split the group into parents and pups. I passed out sounds and the students had to make their specific sounds to reunite! Check out how amazing it worked out!

You can get this activity included in my 50 pages of All About Bats. Just click the image below!

It will be a week you won't forget!