Thursday, November 28, 2013

My Life as a Pilgrim Child and Colonial Kid Fashion Show!

 My Life as a Pilgrim Child
We recently had our open house for parents and decided to add a little Colonial spin.  My two favorite books to read for this unit are Sara Morton's Day and Samuel Eaton's Day.  They are wonderful nonfiction texts that portray the day in the life of a pilgrim child.  My class really got into it!  After we read the story, I had my students pretend that they were a pilgrim child from that time period.  They then used the information from the book to write about their day.

Colonial Kid Fashion Show  
  Inside the two books mentioned above, they showed all of the clothing that the pilgrims had to wear.  My students used the diagrams from the books to create a Colonial Kid Fashion Show!  Each student worked with a partner to design a pilgrim girl or boy.  They even got to choose a name for their pilgrim from the actual pilgrims that were on the Mayflower!  They then wrote a commentary card describing what their pilgrim wore from their hat to their shoes.  They then put on their colonial fashion show for the class. 

Colonial Village
My class had a fun time designing a 3-D model of a colonial village.  Each child made a colonial style home from a milk carton.  They then made a garden, trees, and some animals to go along with their home.

Author's Purpose Pie
Since we were also studying author's purpose this week, we created an author's purpose pie.  Students read a story in their guided reading group, determined the author's purpose for writing the story, and then found text evidence to support their answer. 

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!