Home Run Teacher

Now that Halloween has come and gone, it's time for all of the beautiful artwork to come down.  This week we got our creative juices flowing with scarecrow art and writing.  We began by reading the book Scarecrow by Cynthia Rylant.

The pictures in this book are beautiful!  The author describes the life of a scarecrow through a poetic story; painting pictures with her words.  Once we read the story, we talked about the life of a scarecrow and the general consensus was that my class would not like to be scarecrows.

Following this lovely read, I gave my students the task of creating their own scarecrow heads out of paper.  The only thing given to them was the brown for the face and they went to to town using my gigantic scrap bin (which has taken me years to build up.)  They built for 30 minutes, ensuring their scarecrow was perfect!  Here are some of their amazing creations!

Imagine having these cute little faces staring at you all day in a cornfield!  This project was followed up during Writer's Workshop with the writing portion of the assignment.  We talked about making things "come to life" like the author did in the book.  The students then set to work, giving their scarecrows a story. Here are a few examples of their little stories:

I love how on the last one, she says her scarecrow has no "theef" (teeth) because no scarecrow has theef, but she loves to eat pasta!  Clearly we are still working on our writing, but it is only the 3rd month of First Grade.