Friday, January 28, 2011

The Mitten

This week we spent some time getting familiar with the book, The Mitten, by Jan Brett. This is one of my favorite books for winter! I love how silly it is and how true to life parts of it are... how many of you have single mittens at home missing their match?!If you haven't read The Mitten you should definitely check it out!


We read the book together on Monday and then each day a group of students read it as their listening center for the week. After reading, they filled out a sheet with their favorite part. Most of them liked the bear the best!

We also made our own retelling mitten. The children colored and cut out all of the animals and a mitten and then we put them together with a ziploc bag so that the children can retell the story to their friends and families. Be sure to ask them to do this!

On Thursday we did some "Mitten Math". Each table group had a mitten and we estimated how long the mitten was and how many cubes it would hold. Then we actualyl measured using cubes and filled them to the brim. Afterwards , we talked a little bit about what estimating means and how to decide if our estimate was a good one based on how close it was to the real number. This also went along with what we've been learning about more and less because the students had to decide if their estimate was more or less than the real number. We had a lot of fun... who knew you could have fun doing math!?
To end our unit on the mitten, we acted out the story as a class. This gave my students who are more kinesthetic or movement oriented learners a chance to shine!




The kids had a great time cramming into our homemade mitten! I think they will all remember this classic story for a long time to come!

1 comment:

Amy Daniels said...

Dylan really loved doing this. He came home and told me all about it!