Tall Tales- What I'm Teaching This Week

This is always one genre of books that I love to teach. Over the past few years, I save this for the last few weeks of school. 1- to keep those mind on school work instead of the warm temps outside and 2- my students are fascinated by these characters and the exaggerated events they get into!

A few year ago I got a unit from Kristen Smith and it is JAM packed with so many great ideas for the books I am reading this week.

To start off the week we talk about the elements of a Tall Tale. We use this anchor chart made by

Life In First Grade, Her's is much better than mine..haha

Our first book of the week is Pecos Bill

We then start a list of all the Books/ Characters we will be reading about during the week. Here is where my kids will tell about why/ how this book is a Tall Tale. We focus a lot on looking for

the elements with each book.

Then students complete this or another graphic organizer

We will keep the format the same all week long..read another Tall Tale, list the traits and elements of that tale, compare them to other characters we read about during the week and some more writing. Here are the other books we will be reading.

This amazing pack also comes with  literacy centers that we will be using this week. Some of the skills covered are antonyms, punctuation, adjectives, ABC order, segmenting words, and writing "how to" stories. I know these will keep my students excited about learning this week!

Another great set of centers we will also be using this week is this Picnic Set from Reagan Tunstall

Here students will be working on sight words, building sentences, compound words, blends, and antonyms.

Here are some pictures of us working on centers from last week

The kids look forward to these each week. It also gives me a great deal of information on how they are doing with these skills.

Make sure to stop by next week to hear all about another favorite week of mine... the 3 Little Pigs!

Happy Teaching.