Life Cycles and Text Features

This week at school, we learned about life cycles of plants and in honor of Halloween, we did the life cycle of a pumpkin on paper plates and they came out totally cute! Of course I saw it first on Pinterest, so I HAD to try it! 

Here are a couple of examples:

In other news, in reading this week, our mini-lessons have been focused on non-fiction text features. One of my colleagues came up with the idea of having the kids do a scavenger hunt in different non-fiction magazines (Weekly Reader, Scholastic News, Time for Kids, and National Geographic for kids) and glue examples into a lotus diagram. They came out awesome! They had to find a certain number of examples for each feature and glue it in the lotus. 

Here are a few: 

I have more examples but for some reason, they are not inserting correctly. 

Anyway, it was a fun way to review the different text features they learned this week and I am using it as a major project grade. 

More fun stuff to come later!