| Procedures/Activities: |
1.)Day 1-To introduce this unit, read Four Seasons for Four Seasons by Tomi Depaola. Briefly discuss the four seasons with the students.
Then read aloud Poppleton in Winter by Cynthia Rylant. Then lead a discussion describing winter in students' town/city.
Discuss the different holidays that are in winter including: Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, New Year's, Valentine's Day. Discuss that it sometimes snows in the winter.
Discuss things the students enjoy doing during winter such as: playing in the snow, drinking hot chocolate, sledding. While discussing these things, write each activity on a chart. Discuss the things that students need to wear in the winter. Talk about the need for hats, scarves, boots, sweaters, mittens, and gloves. Show some of these items to the children.
Discuss the way that trees and plants look in the schools town/city in the winter. Discuss how the trees have lost all their leaves. After the discussion, each student will draw a picture of their favorite part of winter. They will write one sentence describing their picture. The pictures will be saved to put in class book at the end of the unit.
2.)Day 2- Review things discussed on day 1.
Then read Poppleton in Spring by Cynthia Rylant. Lead a discussion of how winter turns into spring, and then the way that the trees and plants begin to bloom. Look at pictures of trees and plants in the spring. Discuss how they no longer need to wear their winter clothes. We will discuss how we can now wear our short sleeves during the day, but we sometimes still need a long sleeve or light jacket at night.
Discuss holidays in the spring including Easter, St. Patrick's Day, Mother's Day.
Discuss activities in the spring, to include flying kites and planting flowers and gardens. Write these ideas on a chart as they are discussed. Have the students act out activities they do in the spring and have the class guess the activity. Then have the children draw a picture of their favorite part of spring and write one sentence about the picture. Teacher will keep these for a class book.
3.)Day 3- Review what was learned about winter and spring.
Read aloud Summer:An Alphabet Acrostic by Leslie Evans. Discuss the way that trees change as we go from spring to summer. Children will relate best to this as the time that they do not come to school. Discuss activities they do during the summer such as swimming, bike riding, going to the beach, family vacations, playing at the park, picnics, or fishing. Have each students share the best thing they did this past summer. Discuss the things they will wear during the summer, including swim suits, shorts, sandals, and sunglasses will write these ideas on a chart as they are discussed. Look at pictures of people doing summer activities. Students will then draw a picture of their favorite summer activity and write one sentence to describe their picture. Teacher will save these for class book.
4.)Day 4- Review things discussed about winter, spring and summer.
Read Poppleton in Fall by Cynthia Rylant. Discuss how trees change as summer leads into fall. Discuss how the leaves change color and begin to fall off the trees. Discuss activities that we do in the fall such as raking leaves, picking pumpkins, picking apples, going on hayrides or playing football. Write each activity on a chart as they are discussed.
Discuss holidays that are celebrated in the fall such as Halloween and Thanksgiving. Children will also associate this as the time that they start back to school.
If teaching this lesson during the fall let the students put on a fashion show to demonstrate the types of clothing they wear during the fall.
Children will then draw a picture of their favorite fall activity and write a sentence about their picture. Teacher will put all pictures together from the three days into a class book.
5.)Day 5-8 Demonstrate how to create a newsletter (or flyer) using word processing software. Each child will make his own newsletter/flyer to show favorite seasonal activity and what they would wear. Work with small groups to help complete the newsletters. On the newsletter/flyer they will include each season and an activity they do in that season. They will also include something that they wear during each season. They will create the newsletter using simple sentences, print the flyer, and then draw or color the pictures. If volunteer parents or older students are available to help with this activity, students may insert clip art or pictures from the Internet instead of drawing pictures and dictate the sentences to be typed.
6.)Day 9-12 Teacher will first demonstrate how to make a slideshow of what they know about each of the four seasons using PowerPoint (show the attached slideshow as an example).
Work with a small group each day to create the slideshows. Each child can do one of the four slides for each slideshow. Include a slide on each season with pictures of things that would be a part of that season. Pictures should include appropriate clothing, activities and possibly holidays. The attached rubric may be used to evaluate the slideshows and newsletters.
7.)Website: ( www.clipsahoy.com) Clip art for the newsletter/brochure and powerpoint presentation can be found at this site.
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