Chain of Events

Happy (almost) New Year Everyone! We hope you all had a wonderful time celebrating the holidays with your friends and families. We go back to school on Wednesday, so we are back in school mode a little bit already. We wanted to share with you something we with our students just before Winter Break started. We did an author study on Laura Numeroff. She is one of our favorite authors and our students love love love her books. First we used her books to teach "cause and effect" which later led to a lesson on "chain of events." Below you can find the anchor chart we used to introduce a CHAIN OF EVENTS. 

After reading If You Take A Mouse to the Movies by Laura Numeroff we created our own chain of events by writing the events that took place in the story on strips  of paper (pre-made of course) and connecting the completed strips to create a "chain of events" with our groups. Our teams (we sit in groups of 4... totally Kagan) worked together to create the chains and then shared what they had made with the class. All of our firsties had a great time creating the chains all while COOPERATIVELY working together. To bring in a little WHOLE BRAIN teaching into this lesson we taught a chain of events motion where students made a circle using their fingers and linked them together to show a chain. They did this motion while saying "A chain of events are events or actions linked together." We let the students tug at their "chain" and discussed how without one event, the other may not happen. Rest assured, our students are masters at recognizing a chain of events in a story! Woo! Mission Accomplished!

*One more thing*

To complete our author study we sent Laura Numeroff an email using her contact information on her website and when we received not one, but TWO emails from our new favorite author the kids were THRILLED! It was adorable!