Groundhog Day!

I love Groundhog Day!!  My class was so excited to participate in all of the activities of the day!  Thank you to Cara at The First Grade Parade for sharing your creativity!! The activities in this post are all from Cara's Groundhog Day Unit. She has been such an inspiration to me over the past year. Here blog has challenged me to continue to develop new ways to implement curriculum in a way that is standards-based, encourages deep thinking and makes learning....FUN! Pick up a copy of Cara's unit here.  :)  All of her units are incredible!!

We had a fun-filled day completely devoted to the one and only- Punxsutawney Phil!

We started our day off with a graph...."Will the Groundhog See His Shadow?" 

The students made their own graphs.

Then it was time to analyze our data.  Unfortunately, Phil DID see his shadow.....6 more weeks of winter for us! :(

We watched the video of Phil's weather forecast to check our own predictions.

Reviewing adjectives, nouns and verbs. 

In Reader's Workshop, we read, Wake Up, Groundhog! by Susanna Leonard Hill.  For our Readers' Response today, we talked about how groundhogs hibernate and they would miss many of the events that we celebrate during the winter.  Each student wrote a letter addressed to Punxsutawney Phil to tell him about some of the events he missed while he was asleep. :)

For our pre-writing activity, the students developed a timeline of several events in their lives from                                  October- February 2nd.

One student's letter to Phil.