The Dinosaur theme allows many opportunities to integrate math and writing. This specific theme focuses on informational content in relation to meeting the core curriculum outcomes.
Gathering Information
The companion emergent readers, the information sheets found within the unit and online videos were used to gather information. Based on the information obtained the students guided writing lessons revolved around this.
Math Integration
Estimating and Measuring
In the craft center, the students designed their own dinosaur (with assistance from my E.A). As an introduction to the estimating and measurement math unit, I had the students estimate how many snap cubes long or tall their dinosaur was. I can tell from their answers that more work is needed in this area. They wrote this on the template found in the link below:
Guided Writing
The shape booklet was used by the students to write about dinosaurs. The shape booklet is found within the Dinosaur theme.
I displayed the emergent reader “About Dinosaurs” on the Smart Board as a shared reading experience (found within the theme unit). We discussed the describing words used within the reader (fast, fierce, tall, etc.). We also worked on the sight words found within the reader: look, at and the. The “ook” word family was also the focus. Together we generated more describing words that could used when writing in their dinosaur shape book. They came up with kid words (rainbow and polka-dotted). A few of their writing samples are displayed in the photographs.
Each day the students will be writing a sentence about information they learned about the different dinosaurs we will be studying.
Picture One – Look at the spike dinosaur (spiky)
Picture Two – Look at the ranbo spike dimund dinosaur (rainbow and diamond)