Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Where in the World Am I?!

This week we are reading The Armadillo from Amarillo. 
The Armadillo from Amarillo
This is a really cute story about an Armadillo who wants to learn about where he is in this world. As we were reading this story, it became very evident that my students didn't know the difference between city, state, country, etc. Because of this, I decided to do a mini geography (and science)  lesson by using a handy dandy foldable. I have been seeing so many great posts about how  others use foldables in their class, so I wanted to give it a try. I honestly have never used one before and the kids were REALLY excited to get the chance to choose 3 different colors of construction paper. 
With my third graders we went step by step on how to actually fold these, being sure to leave about an inch between each sheet. We then folded them all up and glued. 
Using the foldable we are working on breaking down geography terms and locating where in the world we are (just in case Armadillo wanted to know)....If you decide to use 3 pages like us, you will end up with 6 tabs. We divided them up into a title page, school and city, island and state, country, continent, and planet. You will then have something like this:

Today as a class, we looked at some maps and took notes about what we should write in each fold. Tomorrow, the students will be working on drafting their sentences about each topic. I just did a quick sample of a few of the pages to show anybody who is interested. 
This is the basic format that each child's foldable will follow. The students really enjoyed this story and it was a wonderful opportunity to brush up on some geography and science (we are also going into a big discussion about the planets tomorrow). I'm actually going to let the kids research the planets, and then we will meet back to discuss their findings!! 

Hope you all have a wonderful Wednesday!!

2 comments:

  1. We did this foldable during our map and communities unit. This story is in our basal that we don't use anymore. I wish I would have remembered it! Great idea!

    Adventures of a Third Grade Teacher

    ReplyDelete