Make a Backbone!

HAPPY CYBER MONDAY!!!!!!  Am I the only one who has not Cyber shopped?  I think I might be on the Cyber world's back porch!

We are over our knees studying about animals!  We began our unit by identifying everything we could think of about animals' characteristics, habitats, traits, relationships, and behaviors!  We discussed how we knew the information we learned and what we what to discover!  Almost like a KWL!

Next we read one of my favorite authors -Steven Jenkin's-nonfiction publication: (Robin Page-coauthor)


It is an awesome book that allows your students to use their inferencing, prediction, guess and check, and main idea and details strategies and skills!  Best of all my students wanted to read it during their DIRT-Daily Independent Reading Time and put it on their Hot List too!  This is also a Common Core Text Exemplar (Grades K-1, Read Aloud Informational Text).

Next we discussed how certain animals have a backbone just like us!  I showed them pictures of our spine-backbone on the Smartboard and then compared and contrasted that to animal backbones that we viewed!  THEY WERE AMAZED TO FEEL IT AND THEN SEE AN IMAGE OF IT!  We proposed reasons for our backbones and why an animal might have one!  We also discussed why a octopus and a jellyfish do not have a backbone.  What can they do that we can not and vice versa!

Finally we discussed the parts of the backbone-specifically the vertrebrae and the discs.  We used a pipecleaner for the spine, soft life savers for the discs, and wagon wheels for the vertrebrae!
Here is a link to a 5th grade teacher's lesson that I adapted:
click here

Just starting

Over half way done

It's my backbone; I just need to shorten the ends of my "spine.'

It was a sit up straight time!!!

Smiles,