Happy Campers!

As a new teacher, I have just barely begun to tap into all of the teaching resources and online communities that offer inspiring ideas and materials for making teaching fun and much easier! Our principal encouraged us to use the last month of school to focus on creating our own unit of study that we could align with the new Common Core State Standards that Baltimore City Public Schools are moving towards adopting city-wide.  I have been spending a great deal of time on a few great teacher blogs that truly inspired - and directly influenced - what I came up with!  Those of you that know me know that I love to be outside and will jump at the chance to go camping!  My city students often don't have the opportunity to get out into the great outdoors so I thought this was the perfect opportunity to share my love of camping with them - and my Happy Campers unit was born.

 Mrs. Halbert at Learning with a Happy Heart! and Mrs. Carrol at The First Grade Parade were huge inspirations.  I downloaded some of the materials that they created when implementing camping units in their own classrooms from Teachers Pay Teachers (this site literally changed my life as a first year teacher).  Among the highlights of implementing this unit were: 

• Setting up a real tent in our library and letting students do their independent reading in it!  (Special thanks to our school special educator, Katie Horn, for lending us the tent!)
• Reading the students spooky campfire stories with all the lights out and a flashlight under my chin!
• Listening to the spooky stories that students wrote themselves!
• Showing the students pictures of one of my real life camping trips!
• Learning about constellations and where we can go to the night sky best!
• Watching students apply their knowledge of fractions while making S'mores!
• Reading many books about camping, outdoor activities, and funny fictional stories about camping capers! 

As always, there are some ways that I will refine this unit to make it more cohesive and have some of the activities spark some deeper academic learning but overall I loved it and I think the kiddos did too!  :)