Shades of Fall and A Freebie! - Around the Kampfire

Here in Arizona we only have two seasons: hot and hotter and oh, how I miss Fall! Each year I practically clean out the dollar store adding to my collection of strands of fall leaves. Sometimes you have to create your own seasons!

fall bulletin board bats owls shades of meaning vocabulary leaves

Shades of Fall Vocabulary

We’ve been working with synonyms and identifying the different levels of intensity or shades of meaning that words with similar

meanings can have.

fall leaves shades of meaning smartboard activity

My class sorted the synonyms then arranged them in order of strongest meaning. To practice, I had everybody work in pairs with a thesaurus to look up synonyms for familiar words and write them in order of intensity in their notebooks. Next, they wrote them on paint chips die cut into leaf shapes.

fall leaves paint chips shades of meaning idea

fall leaves shades of meaning paint chip idea

For some added practice, I made this page and added it to our literacy centers.

fall vocabulary freebie shades of meaning

You can grab a copy {HERE}

Writing About Nocturnal Animals

We’ve spent the better part of October learning about nocturnal animals and reading lots of informational books about bats and owls. My favorite book to begin learning about bats is Stellaluna. Teaching with Stellaluna is a dream for building comprehension and addressing many ELA standards. This post explains how I use Stellaluna to turn my readers into comprehenders.

Owl facts anchor chart with a focus on plurals vs. contractions.

Bats paired texts anchor chart comparing fiction and nonfiction books.

As we study nocturnal animals, students research and write informational books about them. This one is about Geckos which are very common here in Arizona.

We also have over 28 different species of bats in Arizona! I got this incredible poster from the AZ Dept. of Fish and Game and it’s been a really fun resource PLUS my kids think it’s about the coolest thing ever!