5 days of The Little Red Hen activities and Thanksgiving Economics Lessons

One of my favorite units to teach is fables.  My Common Core Unit I use for this is Life Lessons.  I love teaching kids to read and learn from characters’ mistakes!  The Little Red Hen activities we will talk about today give kids some excellent real-life examples of this!

I especially love when fables or other stories make it easy to weave in some economics into first grade because that means I can “kill 2 birds with 1 stone.”

Last year, I blogged about how I use The Little Red Hen activities and lessons during Thanksgiving season.  But I love this book…and I just didn’t have time to blog about everything I do with this book…so I’m back again this year blogging about more of the Thanksgiving economics lessons I tie in with this fable.  

We spent all last week reading The Little Red Hen…with a new purpose each day! Let’s take a closer look at each day and The Little Red Hen activities and Thanksgiving economics lessons included.

 

day 1: Is the little red hen a fable?

We read The Little Red Hen to decide if it was a fable or not.  We had already discussed the elements of a fiction story and how even though this story was about animals, it was not a non-fiction animal book like we were used to from our previous animals unit.

Then, we discussed what a fable was and charted the elements of a fable and how it was a special genre of fiction…

After we read The Little Red Hen, we used our fables anchor chart to decide if it was a fable or not.

day 2: the moral of the story

The next day, we reread the story to decide what the life lesson or moral of The Little Red Hen was.  Then, we added our moral to our group sign….each of my table groups is named for a one of the fables we study during our unit.

These covers and moral cut-outs are included in the Life Lessons Unit.

Day 3: Goods & SErvices of the Little REd Hen

On day 3, we reread the story and listened for goods and services the hen used to make her cake.  We charted them, and then they sorted in partners.  Then, we sorted and checked together on the anchor chart.

DAy 4: Economic resources in The Little Red Hen

Day 4 was a repeat of day 3, except with resources instead of goods and services.

Here’s some partner work….

Our big idea board is already filling up with anchor charts after only a week into this unit!

Day 5: Retelling fables

On the last day of the week, we reread the book and wrote about the characters, setting, beginning, middle and end and the life lesson of this fable.  We did this graphic organizer as a guided writing activity where they copied everything we wrote together…but by the end of the unit, they will be able to do this independently!  It’s so fun to see the transformation!

Yes…this was a drawn out process for this book, but I’ve learned over the years that slower is better sometimes with fables.  My first year with this unit, I tried to cram in as many fables as possible and it just wasn’t as effective as picking a few good ones and doing them well…this process will speed up to about 2 fables each week (or a new fable every 3 days) once we get better at the routine though!

Where Can I Find The Little Red Hen Activities?

Grab all of The Little Red Hen activities HERE.  Or get the whole Life Lessons Unit with all 8 fables and SAVE!