Olson's Terrific Kids

present

Fall is Here!  We Love it!
A Collaborative Internet Literacy Project Fall 2004
 
All of the following information about background/objective is from the originator of this project: Marci McGowan. 

c-FallingLeaf.gif (345 bytes) Background


5094584.gif (4720 bytes)Our project was inspired by Elaine Good's autumn book, Fall is Here!  I Love It!  All the pages follow a similar format with a child experiencing the sights, colors, tastes, and smells as fall comes to the family farm. 

Beautifully illustrated by Susie Wenger, it shows simple, everyday, predictable things - things we know well and are happy to see again.   A similar project, based on another Elaine Good book, That's What Happens When It's Spring!, received a Miss Rumphius Award from the RTEACHER Listserv (International Reading Association).  

 c-FallingLeaf.gif (345 bytes) Objectives

c-FallingLeaf.gif (345 bytes)Fall Is Here!  We Love It! is a collaborative literacy project.  Students will share signs of autumn in their different communities through writings and illustrations.   Classes K-4 and older special education students are welcome to participate. 

c-FallingLeaf.gif (345 bytes)After reading and listening to autumn stories and identifying signs of the new season, students will illustrate and write a descriptive class poem or paragraph ending with Fall Is Here!  We Love It!

c-FallingLeaf.gif (345 bytes)The project fits well in a study about seasons, communities, or weather, and includes whole-class and individual student poetry writing.  It's also a good project for teachers new to Internet collaboration as well as those more experienced, and it easily is aligned to literacy, science, and technology standards.

 
Our Whole Class Collaboration

 

Fall is Here!  We Love It!

Written by Olson's Terrific Kids

October 2004

Fall is here! We love it!

We like fall.
scary fall
haunted fall
gold fall
scared fall   

We like fall.
fall turning
fall haunting
fall scaring
fall screaming

We like fall.
fall on the leaves
fall under the tree
fall in the day
fall over the night  

Fall is here!  We love it!

 

To see poems by other classes that participated in this project, click here!

 
We followed a poetry lesson from Learning with Word Tiles from Primary Concepts.  In this lesson, we used Fall Word Tiles.  In the first section we picked fall adjectives.  In the second section we picked fall verbs and in the final section we used prepositions and nouns to complete our poem.  The kids liked that it was so easy to make a poem.  And they were surprised to find out that poems don't have to rhyme.  

Since we had to discuss fall in our community, we needed to take into account that in our part of Arizona fall looks and feels different than in other places in the US.  For instance, we couldn't use adjectives like chilly and windy when our temperatures are still up near 100 degrees.  Also we eliminated a lot of verb tiles, raking for instance.  We don't have a lot to rake up here.  So most of our experience with fall comes from our holiday fun of Halloween.

 

Just a few of our individual poems about fall....

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Graphics on this page courtesy of Graphic Garden.

Last Updated 10/29/04