Family Trees

Hope your weekend was restful and fun.  I surfed on Friday and Saturday and today I am extremely sore!! But I am so happy I got to get out in the water again:))

This week will be the last week of the quarter if you can believe it!! It has been a busy one and I am ready for Fall Break!

This quarter our Social Studies benchmarks included the following:

Chronological Thinking
Construct timelines to sequence events

Historical Inquiry
Investigate the history of families using level-appropriate primary sources (e.g., artifacts, photographs, interviews, documents)

Cultural Systems and practices
Describe ways in which own and other cultures express their cultural beliefs and practices through music and art

These are our state standards, but there is no set curriculum. We have always had to come up with activities on our own. I shared with you our variety of timelines that we have created. Now on to our families.

Each year I have students create their family tree.  We share this book first:

 I am sure many of you have used this one as well.  It's easy and straight forward.  I discuss family trees and share about our immediate families.  I then send home a blank family tree template and have students work with their parents to write in just the first names of family members.  I give them at least a week to get it back to school with busy parent schedules.

Once they have all been returned we get started on creating our family tree.  This year I decided to go with our Tropical Theme and we made a Palm Tree:)

I drew out the top and made a template and just traced it for all of the students.  I cut some strips of brown paper and they glued it onto their papers.  Then I made some circle templates and had them trace out their coconuts onto brown paper.

 Then they colored them in brown so they would look more like coconuts.

 We glued the coconuts onto our tree.  I took them step by step through this process

so that their coconuts weren't all mixed up:)

The next day I gave them blank white circles and they drew a picture of each family member and

wrote in their names.  I had them make sure to just draw everything first, before they cut them out so we wouldn't lose any of them!

Once they were finished they looked at their homework sheet to help them put them all in the right

order.  We then wrote Our Ohana on the top of the page.

(Ohana means family, if you haven't seen Lilo and Stitch, lol!)

I love them and so do the kids!  We shared out in class and I know that their families will love them too!!

I have the templates that I used on Google Docs if you want them. It's pretty simple to do without though.

This coming week is all about our Cultures and we have some fun activities planned so Stay Tuned...

I will leave you with a fun freebie that I created for my Word Work center.  My students are having trouble with the parts of speech so I decided to start off with just nouns.  We have discussed them, but I know they need more practice.  This is a fun way to practice  and get them in the mood for Halloween.

Just click on this link to grab it in my TpT store.