Rivers of the World/North America

There was so much to squeeze in today!!!!! We started off with the science and social studies pre-tests. Based on watching them work, they seemed to have a better handle on the vocabulary for science and social studies than they did for the art pretest. I have to mark  them and see.

Once the pretest was finished I reviewed the continents we had learned last time. No hesitations, nobody told me states or country or city names, just rattled off the continent names! I asked them what continent we live on (response: North America). Then I asked if they knew what countries were in North America. This was a little harder. They seem to be unclear about the difference between a city, a state, a country, and a continent. These boundaries are so abstract. But finally we got the right response (United States of America, Canada, Mexico).
Cindy and I tag-teamed today. I was a bit unclear about how we were going to use the book resources to step through the people/animals/uses/problems, etc. Cindy led the rivers word splash brainstorm to see what the kids could come up with- and they did successfully generate all the topics we had hoped they would. They got a little carried away with ocean life and really wanted to show off their newfound geology science knowledge, so Cindy reined it in a little.

River word splash brainstorming

 Then I read a short book titled "Living Near a River" by A. Fowler. This book generated a lot of new vocabulary for the kids, and each page sparked a short related description as Cindy and I bounced ideas back and forth

lots of new vocabulary today!!!!

 Cindy then took over leading the kids through a river find in their atlases. There were opportunities to use some of our arts elements vocabulary about lines..thin...curved...colors, as they tried to find things on the map. Then Cindy did a picture walk through a book about the Mississippi river and the kids listened and observed for information regarding people, animals, plants, houses, uses, and problems to write notes for the post-it page of categories. We lacked time today, but I'd like the kids to use some of that information to add imagery to their world maps.

Mississippi people, animals, houses, uses, problems notes

People:Indians, cowboys, fisherman, pioneers....

 People and animals were the most popular note-taking topics. Obviously those are areas that interest this age group a great deal.

animals: beaver, buffalo, crocodiles (um-alligators?), armadillo

 There was very little time left, but my ultimate goal for the day was to get the kids to start stitching their world maps. I had them look at their paper version first to find North America, locate the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, and trace the path of the river between the 2. Then I asked them to find the same points on their fabric version. Cindy kindly printed out a transparency for me to project, and I marked and stressed vocabulary source, meander, and mouth. I passed around an example of my own embroidery for them to see and feel what the stitches should look like.

stitched Mississippi

 We quickly handed out supplies and I instructed the  kids how to mount their fabric in the embroidery hoop. I'm calling our needle magnets a "dock" this time instead of a parking spot. And we compared the needle to a boat traveling down the river from the source to the mouth. I showed how to thread the needle and knot the ends and how to do a running stitch following the path they'd drawn.

a bit of a meander

I'm amazed at how quickly and smoothly the stitching went! Perhaps because Cindy has done this with me before she felt more comfortable helping the kids get started- threading and knotting, checking that they'd done it correctly. Perhaps it seemed to go so well just because we were stitching a short line. But I only saw one kid stitch around the hoop, and everybody had nice small stitches (I had stressed tiny,tiny stitches, too)

nice small stitches

I feel very confident about stitching with these kids. Now that I've seen Cindy go through the Mississippi lesson I feel better about being able to lead our other world river lessons. If we'd had enough time today, I would have liked the kids to add images to their world maps with fabric markers or more stitching to show what they understand about the people/animals/uses etc.
I had the flipcam with me, but it's so hard to remember to document when you're in the middle of teaching!