It's All About Elmer

I had been meaning to make a post about this earlier in the year but never had the chance to get round to it. Life with a 2 year old does put strains on your free time. Nonetheless I am currently teaching in Abu Dhabi at a school that is complete 100% Emirate students. There are no Pakistani, Saudi, Lebanese, Philippine, Indian or Western children at our school, despite the fact that it is a government school. It is strictly for Emirate children.

That being said I teach Grade One, ages 6-7 and a lot of the children don't understand about diversity, seeing as there is no cultural diversity in the school. I wanted to do a week study on Elmer the elephant; I know Elmer is usually used to teach about how to stand out when you are different. I however wanted to use Elmer to show how different people really are from one another, and that it is ok. The part at the beginning when all the other elephants look the same was a big influence, as I wanted the students to understand that not everyone is the same, and that it is normal and part of life. I had a hard time finding some thematic activities to help support the teaching of Elmer, as well as some extension ideas.

To get your own copy of my Elmer Activity Pack Click Here

Sublime Space Unit

So over the last 3 weeks my grade 1 students in the UAE have been learning a lot about space, the solar system, and astronauts. This was a great end of the year unit as the students (they may be grade one but their English level is below Kindergarten ability in the States), and they could apply a lot of their new English skills to what we were doing. We spent a week on each of the topics:

Stars and Moon, Planets, Astronauts and Space Travel.

At the end of the unit our team put together a SPACE DAY, where the students got to come dressed as astronauts and complete hands on activities involving everything they had learned about space. Check out some of our displays and activities below!

Our Moon Table

8 Phases of the Moon Cycle

Writing about Astronauts in Napkin Books

Counting how many big stars and small stars we used to make a constellation

After reading "Papa Please Get the Moon for Me" the students wrote a sentence about who they would get the moon for and made a picture depicting their writing 

Life Cycle of a Star

Images can be found

Here

The cut and paste worksheet for the Star Life Cycle is my own creation which you pick up at my TPT store. 

My TPT Account

The large circles next to our KWL chart are planets that the students made by cutting images from magazines. They had to decide what kinds of things could be found on their planet

Below is our working wall for the Space Unit

This was a great activity where a student got to dress up as an astronaut and we would discuss all the parts that an astronaut wears. Then I would pick several students to come and stick a label on the part of the astronaut outfit. For kids with little English this was a great visualization to help them understand

We are encouraged to do weekly science experiments with the students so we modified the "Blubber" experiment for "Insulation". Same idea as the blubber for winter animals experiment just with talking about what keeps astronauts warm in space

Some of the grade one team getting ready for Space Day! (Not a flattering picture I might add). All the students came dressed as astronauts and engaged in the following activities:

1. Making constellations

2. Labeling Planets

3. Sorting Space Rocks

4. Making Tang in a bag

5. Making the 8 Moon Phases

6. Taking a photo on the Moon

7. Walking on the Moon

8. Jumping in Space

They were also given a "Planet Passport" as each of our activities was labeled under the name of a planet. At each activity they had to write a sentence about what they were doing. There was also some form of writing for them to complete as well, like writing moon facts, writing about how high they could jump, etc...