Bear-y Common Core Updated with Bear-y Good Freebies!

Wow! Two posts in one week from me. I am on a roll! :)
We start school in exactly two weeks! Yikes! Since we start on a Wednesday, I like to have the first 3 days filled with fun activities. Last year we changed our theme to bears and it was so fun! The kids loved the unit, so we are sticking with it!

Here are some of the activities we used.
First, I projected the Bears non-fiction reader and we read it as a class.

We read it one more time and had to decide on our favorite bear and why. I let students know they had to pick a bear from the text because of something they heard or saw in the text. In other words, "because it's soooo cute!" was not an acceptable answer. Then, the kids looked around the room to find the bear that was their favorite. They moved to the corner with their bear and when signaled they buddied up with a partner. When signaled again, they told their partner the reason they chose the bear.
Last year, this was pretty much an experiment. Could first graders give a text based reason within the fort three days of school? And guess what? They could!

Next, the students completed this opinion writing activity. Click the pic for this freebie!

We did lots of other fun filled math activities too.
-Making 5 with Teddy Grahams. Click for freebie!

-Gummy Bear Sorting/ Graphing

- Bring a Teddy day. We sorted our bears, measured our bears, described our bears..

If you're thinking about trying this unit out but study bears later in the year. You're in luck! I just added 4 new student readers for each bear and a venn diagram for compare/contrast. It would be a perfect mini student directed research project. Check out the unit on my TPT shop!