Turtle Observations

On the positive side of Common Core...I am loving the nonfiction portion of the standards! I am truly a nerd! I honestly don't remember my students loving to learn as much as this group! They absolutely telling me what they know about a particular topic before reading the nonfiction book. After we read the book, we go back and check to see if what we knew was accurate or not. If we are still unsure about something then we get to do a little more "research" to find the answer...they love that part too!

We did a small unit of Turtles when learning about the letter. We used alot of the activities that we found on Mrs. Ricca's Kindergarten blog. Now how convenient is it that we have a student in our school that has two very large tortoises?!? 

Look at this thing!

The little guy in the blue shirt in the photo below is a reptile NUT! He adores anything reptile so it was great that the turtle kept walking towards him even after the owner would "redirect" the turtle. It was true love for these two! Well, at least until "nature called" and the tortoise left a "deposit" on the pavement!

After our visit with the turtles and the kids were officially experts on turtles and tortoises, we did a turtle craft & labled the parts of a turtle. The kids then wrote all about turtles using all that new knowledge they had learned.

Here is my teaching partner, Mrs. Workman's bulletin board of our turtle observations.  It was a great day indeed!

I can't wait to see what topic and nonfiction books we get to study next!