Owls, Bats and Spiders?!

If you are a reader out here in blog land---almost everyone, it seems, is talking about bats and spiders!  What better month than October to talk about these creatures?!

This is the first year in MANY years that I am not required to use our Reading series!  (well, last year too---but I only strayed from what I knew for like 8 years... about mid year)  I have been having the time of my life teaching with actual literature about things that kids are SO incredibly excited about!  This past week we tackled owls.  I started with owls, cause well.... my room is filled with owls!  Naturally the kids were excited to learn about it.

We read fiction and informational books---hitting the CCSS's hard!  We discussed informational text features along the way----and we actually did RESEARCH!  (another CCSS covered!)   I broke it up and had the kiddos work in small groups to find information 1 page at a time.  It was SO neat to see them using the INDEX to find pages that they need!  (and I will add---most cannot read all that well-but they were able to take the ABC ordering skills we learned a few weeks ago-which I just realized I never posted about..  I'll try to post about that soon!) and could narrow down their choices to find what they needed!  I couldn't have been prouder!

Check out these cute "research" papers!!!!

(even my messier, more challenged students did really well and were SO engaged!)

We will be redoing the whole thing next week-but with BATS!  Then on to spiders! Speaking of spiders----look who visited our classroom last week as a little "preview"!!!!!!

O.M.G.  Notice how I decided to take a picture of it instead of immediately run for the hills like I would at home?!  So, after taking its picture, I tried various ways in attempt to capture this thing..  Luckily one of my windows does not have a screen (before this day, I thought it was dumb that one of my windows didn't have the screen.... now-not so much!!!)  After getting it into a paper tray, it immediately FLEW out the window!  He was WAAAAAYYYYY too big to step on!  NO WAY did I want to feel that bone chilling "crunch" under my shoe!  EEEEEKKKKK!  I'm SO not a spider person.

Last-I want to leave you with a fun freebie---Click on the picture to grab yourself a copy of the OWL KWL page we used last week.  It is included in my Owl and Bat Research Packet that I just uploaded last night.  I included the pages above that you saw as well as some of the other worksheets I created to use during the week as we read stories and compared them---and used lots of informational books that I checked out of our school library.  You can click on the picture to see more about the packet at TPT!

{Sorry for the sideways picture---I started working with the packet in landscape---so it has a lot of sideways pages!  Luckily when you print it out-it doesn't make a difference!!!}