Follow the Yellow Brick Road...

It was an great week to be a first grader at the school where I work. Not that I am a first grader, but I do work with them everyday and I also happen to be living under the same roof as one very vocal first grade little boy, and we have agreed that this week was "super cool" in every way.

This week our first graders got to step out of the norm and enter the Land of Oz. You know it's going to be a good week when you are watching the Wizard of Oz, eating popcorn, and drinking Sprite on Monday morning, rather than sitting in a classroom and learning your new spelling words for the week!

I was surprised at how many of the kids had never seen or heard of the movie, and it was funny when they started asking why the movie was 'gray' (because if you think about it, the black and white part really does just look gray...funny how it takes a first grader to point that out.

Anyway, while the kids were all in the cafeteria watching the movie, I was busy laying the yellow brick road that I made out of butcher paper and laminated (so that it could be walked on all week), so the kids would be able to walk down the yellow brick road as soon as they got out of the movie.

The yellow brick road in the making.

The finished product.

We had also already put up our own Land of Oz, house with a tornado over it, and a rainbow, but the kids didn't "get" it at all until they saw the movie.

When the kids got out of the movie, the looks on their little faces were priceless. The smiles, the big eyes, and the skipping made all of the hard work worth it.

And our week was just beginning...

Just for the week, we threw out the reading books, spelling words, and grammar books. Instead, all of our activities were centered around different aspects of the movie. The lesson plans actually involved more common core standards than a regular week would have, but the kids didn't even notice because of how much fun they were having.

One thing that we did in all of our classrooms was that we put a witches hat with caution tape around it (remember when the wicked witch melts in the end?). It became like another student in the classroom for the week.

One of the writings they got to do was "if I had ruby slippers" (or 'sneakers' for the boys). Some said they would click their heels together and go to a water park. Some just talked about how happy they would be to just get to wear them. My child said he would make them take him to Branson.

The boy loves him some Branson.

We had the 1st grade hall full of red glitter after we hung our slippers up!

Another writing was 'If I had a Fairy Godmother', where the kids could write about what they would wish for if they had someone who could make their wishes come true. It really is amazing how a first grader's mind works. Some wanted help with homework, some wanted money, and some just wanted to be happy. They were quite touching.

We also got to let them choose their favorite character from the movie, which introduced them to the concept of a bar graph. They got to talk about why that character was their favorite and tell the class about it.

One important life skill that these kids will need to know how to do is to get a presentation together and how to present it in front of the class. We assigned them a character, and had them defend that character, or pretend they were asked to play the part of that character in the movie and write different reasons they would enjoy being that character. This was actually one of my favorite projects because they got to break up into groups and talk about and write some of their favorite things about that character.

After they got it all on their poster, they got to stand in front of the class as a group and present it to the class.

Our art teacher even got into our theme as well and had the kids make witches in their art class for the week.

We had parents that also got involved and sent us Wizard of Oz cupcakes, snacks, and treats.

How cute are these cupcakes?!

And this broom stick treat bag!

And since Dorothy's house was in a tornado during the movie, we had some material over tornadoes. We talked about what to do if you are in a tornado, we did a tornado demonstration using Sprite bottles, and we watched videos on Youtube showing real tornadoes and the damage they can cause.

We also used a lot of compare/contrast thinking and introduced the kids to Venn Diagrams. We read them the story of Cinderella and had them tell what was alike and what was different. We did the same comparing the good witch and the bad witch but I didn't get a picture of that one.

There were also several activities based on colors and rainbows. In one of those, we gave the kids a mini bag of skittles. We had them count how many were in their bag, sort them into colors, and write which color they had the most of. Then we gave them another bag and had them to the same thing.

Ok, did you know that when you grab a mini bag of skittles, you could be getting as few as 10 skittles or as many as 18? I was shocked. How does the counting machine at the skittle factory even work??

We had a worksheet called 'A Color By Any Other Name', where the kids went through their crayons and found colors that looked yellow (for example), but was called 'dandilion' instead. Someone at the Crayola factory has fun with these. There were a few I couldn't even pronounce. After that, we did an experiment with milk and food coloring, showing the kids how we can mix primary colors together to make other colors (yellow and blue make green). They got to give their guess on what they thought, and then we got to watch their eyes light up when they see that their guess was correct.

Another rainbow activity we had was practicing the kids skills on estimation. We gave them a paper that had a rainbow and clouds on it, and then a separate sheet of paper that had an estimation chart on it. We talked about how rainbows are always in the same order (thank you, Roy G Biv), and from that the kids made their estimations on how many fruit loops of each color they would need and how many marshmallows they would need. Then we gave them fruit loops and marshmallows and let them glue them onto their papers. After the project was complete, they went back and counted how many of each color they actually used and wrote it down. Then they could see how close they were on their estimation.

On Friday afternoon, we got all of the first graders together again in one classroom and let them watch the movie again. It was a great wrap-up to our Wizard of Oz week!

 

Wednesday was Halloween, and we thought it would be fun to dress up as the characters from the Wizard of Oz, mainly because we knew our kids would go crazy and totally 'get' it. And we were right. We all had a great time playing our part, but more than that, our kids had a blast with it.

I love how we are standing under the rainbow, on the yellow brick road, with the Land of Oz in the background in this pic.

So this was our Wonderful World of Oz week. It was so much fun, but I don't think I'm the only one that is ready to go back to the routine of grammar, spelling, and reading next week! I am completely worn out, but it was SO worth it!!

**If you are a teacher and are interested in the curriculum we used this week, click here and you can look at the blog we purchased it from, and order it for your school.