Dipping into the Common Core

At Creekside we always have a Bear Week that includes bringing our bears to school for a teddy bear picnic.  This year I included a family research project where children and their families looked up facts about real bears.  The kids chose what type of bear they wanted to research.  At the end of the week, we compared our research notes and compiled the facts about the different types of bears.  I grouped the kids by the type of bear they chose to research and they worked together to make these charts.

The students became "experts" about the bear they researched and we had a lot of discussions about the different facts we learned.  We compared the bears and analyzed the similarities and differences.  The kids drew conclusions and used facts to support their thinking.  We ended the mini-unit by comparing ourselves to a real bear.

The following week during Writer's Workshop time I caught these two boys discussing the differences between the Kodiak bear and the Grizzly bear.  They were using the chart to write more facts about bears.

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