One of the things I love about our Weather Unit is the awesome blend of literacy and science. Literacy and social studies just seem a little easier and more natural sometimes. But with the help of The Wizard of Oz, the blend of fiction reading and the science of weather is perfection!
We are reading a revised version of The Wizard of Oz and each of the first few chapters introduce one of the main characters. I love to use this book to teach character traits, but this year, we added a little bit more technology into this project!
After each chapter focusing on a specific character, we worked at our table groups to "pass the pen" and brainstorm traits of that character {Cowardly Lion in this picture}.
Then, I collected all 6 tables' character trait webs and we shared each one aloud. As I read a trait from each group's web, we talked about whether or not we had read evidence from the text to support that trait... And with our "bubble test" coming up soon, I was so pleased with how well they were able to defend their character traits....or politely argue against someone else's trait!
As each trait was agreed on, I typed it into a wordle. My kiddos were already familiar with wordles because we use them to brainstorm adjectives to describe our ranch hands/student of the week each week. But they love them so much, that any excuse to tie in a wordle is good with my firsties! #easytoplease
I use abcya for my wordles. One reason that I love this one (there are a ton of wordle sites out there) is because it's super kid-friendly. Like my first graders can make their own wordles with very little guidance (but a lot of modeling) when we get to use our laptop set! This time, I had our wordle this screen on our Smart Board so they were definitely more engaged in defending and politely arguing against character traits because they were dying to have their group's word added to our wordle! :)
Then, we click to turn our words into a wordle! With a few adjustments on font and layout and color, we landed on some pretty perfect wordles! Here are a few of our favorites....
After Spring Break, we will be using our knowledge about character traits and text evidence to decide which character said what! And this activity was the perfect building block for next week's activity! You can find the character trait webs and more in Wizard of Oz companion packet!
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