Tall Tales - Pecos Bill

While working through Sonlight D - American History part 1, it only felt fitting that we should do a unit on Tall Tales. I wasn't exactly sure where I wanted to go with this but I knew that I wanted a unit that we could do without a ton of work or planning. After some research, I bought Evan-Moor's Tall Tales Literature Pockets. It has nine different pockets complete with the stories of each tall tale and activities to go along. I wanted J to read and enjoy the stories of these bigger than life Americans.

Our first Tall Tale was Pecos Bill. We read the story in the text but we also read several books from the library. It was interesting that each story had some of the same story elements but they weren't completely identical.

After discussing the elements of a Tall Tale, we worked through the bigger than life worksheet about Pecos Bill.

We talked about how some of the items in the story could have happened and some just couldn't. She chose 2 elements of each and wrote them onto sticky notes.

After she wrote them onto sticky notes, she added them to our chart. We will add elements to this chart after each story that we read.

We discussed several of the vocabulary from the stories and she wrote the definitions in the mini book. This was a great activity for using context clues to derive the meaning of the words.

One activity I added to our study was to create a Tall Tales banner. Each character we learn about will get his/her own flag and we will hang them together when we are done. I gave J several options for this study - create a lap book, make a banner, make a notebook...she chose the banner. She is ever the artist:)

She drew a picture of Pecos Bill riding the tornado and being raised by wolves.

Next was the art project for Pecos Bill. She is creating a moon from a coffee filter colored with markers and a water dropper. The water will make the colors of the markers combine.

This is J's completed art work for Pecos Bill. She made a picture where Bill and two wolves are howling at the moon. She is super creative, she added Pecos Bill in a cave and two rock ledges for the wolves. Now, on to our next tale - Slue Foot Sue. Have a great weekend.