Fun Ideas for Scarecrow Lesson Plans
- Published:
- 2 Comments
Scarecrows are some of my favorite fall friends! It’s so fun to incorporate scarecrows into a week of themed learning. For this post, I’m going to share some of my favorite activity ideas for your early elementary scarecrow lesson plans!
9 Activity Ideas for Scarecrow Lesson Plans
I like to anchor a week of themed learning with an interactive read aloud! For a scarecrow unit, that means starting the week’s lessons with the book Scarecrow by Cynthia Rylant!
1. Interactive Read Aloud
This is one of those books that wriggles deep into my heart. I love books that include gentle spirits and Scarecrow is absolutely a gentle spirit. The illustrations are pretty spectacular and lend themselves to writers workshop as well. We knew we had to include this book in our Engaging Readers units!
You can listen to this amazing book on YouTube. Naturally, you MUST have the book for an interactive read aloud. But I also love offering students other models of fluency.
After reading the book out loud, there are several interactive reading lessons that you can include in your planning. I’ll share a few in this post.
2. Scarecrow Visualization Activity
Cynthia Rylant is always the first author I think about when I want to discuss word choice with my students. So naturally, this book is a great one when we want to practice visualization too.
Students can draw what came to their mind as they listened to Scarecrow by Cynthia Rylant. After drawing their pictures, they can discuss what they drew with a partner. If appropriate for your students, they can also write about what they drew.
We always start every interactive reading lesson with partner discussions. The writing is secondary.
3. Scarecrow Text Details
As with every book we share with our students, we want to draw our students’ attention to the text details in the story. The majority of the time, this means students work on retelling the events in the book. However, some books do not lend themselves to a classic “retell” because the events are not necessarily sequential.
In the case of “Scarecrow”, students can work on sorting events that happened in the text and did not happen in the text.
Then they can add the text details to their own notebook.
4. Making Connections
Students also work on making connections with the text. We love that students can express their thoughts with illustrations. It’s always so fun to see how students feel they connect with Scarecrow.
5. Interactive Writing
An interactive writing activity is another great addition to your scarecrow lesson plans. You can write and illustrate a sentence together with your students. This is a great way to model sentence writing while also discussing details from the story with your students.
6. Scarecrow Literacy Practice
You can incorporate the scarecrow theme into other literacy lessons throughout the week. These could be literacy centers, small group literacy practice, or even whole group instruction.
No matter what skill you’re working on with your students, you could incorporate a little bit of scarecrow fun! This could be specific to the interactive readaloud story or focused on scarecrows in general.
7. Scarecrow Craft
Crafts are always a hit for themed learning weeks! Scarecrow week is no exception!
Crafts give students the chance to improve their hand strength and coordination as they cut and assemble all of the pieces of the craft. It also encourages them to listen carefully to instructions, another much-needed skill for kindergarteners and first graders.
You gotta love the little crow peeking out of this scarecrow’s pocket! These crafts are perfect for a fall bulletin board. Students are always so excited to find their masterpiece hanging on the wall.
8. Scarecrow STEM Challenge
This STEM challenge is another engaging activity for your scarecrow lesson plans.
Students will use the materials you provide to build their own scarecrow. In this example, students are using play dough and popsicle sticks.
I love STEM challenges like this because they give students the chance to use their problem-solving skills and creativity!
9. More Books About Scarecrows
Here are some additional scarecrow books that you can add to your lesson plans for the week. These are some of my favorite fall read alouds for the classroom:
You already know I am a HUGE fan of ALL the Otis books! Pre-cious! With great character lessons as well!
Printable Scarecrow Lesson Plans
If you’re putting together a scarecrow lesson plan for your classroom, I’d love to save you some time! We’ve put together a November Engaging Readers unit that includes “Scarecrow” by Cynthia Rylant along with three other readalouds that are perfect for your November lesson plans.
This interactive read aloud unit will save you hours of work because EVERYTHING is all planned out with easy to follow lesson plans. Just add the book!
Just click on the link below to take a closer look at everything included in this time-saving resource. You’ll be able to put together your scarecrow lesson plans in no time at all!
Scarecrow Free Lesson Plan Template
Would you like to see an example of how these activities could fit into a week of learning? We’ve put together a free scarecrow lesson plan template for you to reference and even edit. You can download this free template by clicking HERE.
Do you need help editing these visual lesson plans? Visit our page with Tech Support for Teachers.
If you love these visual lesson plans, be sure to check out our other Lesson Plan Posts.
More Lesson Planning Tips
You may also be interested in these tips that will help your lessons go more smoothly:
- How I manage stations (Click HERE to view)
- How to introduce stations at the beginning of the year
- What does a guided reading lesson look like
- Literacy station ideas
- Math station ideas
- Early Finishers “I’m DONE!”
- Writers workshop nuts and bolts
- Reading workshop nuts and bolts
- Math workshop questions answered
- Classroom behavior and expectations
- Organizing for Instruction (click HERE to view)
Pin for Later
Recommended Posts
Deedee Wills
My teaching career allowed me to experience teaching in different classroom environments and grades. My heart belongs to early childhood education. My job is to make teaching FUN, ENGAGING, and EASIER. Welcome!
Hi, I'm DeedeE.
My teaching career allowed me to experience teaching in different classroom environments and grades. My heart belongs to early childhood education. My job is to make teaching FUN, ENGAGING, and EASIER. Welcome!
Free curriculum planning Map
Use Promo Code: WILLS
SHOP
Latest Posts
You Might Also Enjoy...
2 Responses
Can we purchase the activities that yo have for Scarecrow by Cynthia Rylant separately?
I am sorry. Right now, we don’t have that book listed individually.