week 26: ALIENS

                                      

The ALIENS theme came about solely due to the book Aliens love underpants.  I'd heard about the book and bought a copy and it was too good not to use for a class.  

We read Aliens love underpants in PreK and K and it was a blast.  The whole thing rhymed and we picked out so much from the pictures. Afterwards, the students had activity sheets from the book to work on while we did our usual check out one table at a time.





I had to find books with Aliens to continue with the theme and I chose Mrs. Watson wants your teeth for the first grade.  It is a semi graphic novel about a girl going into first grade who is told that the teacher is an alien that collects baby teeth.  This was not only good for the alien theme, but it was a great introduction to graphic novels. We discussed the different types of thought bubbles and if they meant the person was speaking the words or only thinking them.

The students loved what we did next.  Each student was given a small rectangle of card stock and markers.  They drew an alien on the paper and cut the alien out.  We had left over quarter page forms with space ships on them from a previous book fair, and the students cut those out and decorated the space ships.   We glued popsicle sticks to them to make stick puppets.  

examples of the two stick puppets the first grade created after reading Aliens love underpants

I discovered Baloney (Henry P) by Jon Scieszki and Lane Smith and read it to the 2nd grade.  This book was very interesting.  The author used words in other languages as the "alien" words Henry used and we guessed the meanings via the context and pictures. There was a list of these words in the back and we could see if we guessed correctly and 





  
   



The second graders were able to make a "girl" alien or a "boy" alien with pre-drawn forms.  After choosing body style, they also could choose what the alien looked like, what colors, how many eyes, how many arms and where the arms were....  There were some wonderful aliens but the kids definitely wanted to take them home, so I can only take a picture of the 2 examples I made and put on the door.

Check out ended during this 6 day period, as summer is here and the library has to be inventoried.   In 3rd, 4th, and 5th, I was keeping notes of which class skipped resource, which watched Pagemaster and where they were in the movie.