Landforms

I was excited to try my first foldable inside the SNB's this week!  It turned out better than I expected.  As we talked about different landforms, students added them (as a class) to their foldables.  The main landforms covered in the 3rd Grade curriculum are rivers, islands, peninsulas, mountains, deserts, and forests.  I was disappointed there were so few listed but getting through those was plenty of work without adding a lot of extras!  After we completed half of them, I read students a couple of books about the rivers and islands.  For rivers I read selections from the "New True Books" series, Rivers.

Off-Topic Side Note:  Can I just say that some of my most favorite books in our school's library are the super old "New True Books" series?  Now I know that when I say they are super old and you look them up in your library and find that they were published in the 70's and 80's you are going to judge me, but for a library book?  Come on, that's old!  They aren't shiny and new, that's for sure!  I loved them when I taught Kindergarten (even some of those kids read and loved them!) and I love them even more now!  My ELA buddy next door had never seen them until I showed her and she was excited because one of her biggest goals this year is to build up students' reading stamina and this fits exactly.

And for islands I read a book I just discovered, An Island Grows.

I modeled a Venn Diagram for students about Continents and Oceans and tasked them to make their own Venn Diagram for islands and rivers.  The next day we finished up our landforms foldable and on the bottom half of the same page they had to add a second Venn Diagram for their choice of two other landforms.  They did well with the concepts, but getting them to write sentences instead of phrases was a struggle with some!

Here are my SNB pages.  Again, I write more of the directions in my SNB so absent students can keep up.  Students' homework was to color their landforms.