I thought I’d start with what’s happening in my classroom. My students have had great fun with two fall themed partner scripts I’ve made. The first set I used focuses on pumpkins and is called The Great Pumpkin Heist. I am using it with my fourth grade group, and the readability of the script between 3rd and 4th. Here is the preview file I put together. The set includes a vocabulary page, question task cards, and a post reading character traits page. ($2.00) The children started out with me for prereading vocabulary and schema building. Then, I paired them for partner reading. Afterwards, I brought them back to our small group table to use the task cards for discussion (Day 1). On day two, we reviewed the vocabulary, did a mini lesson from an Interactive Notebook set I have on character traits, practiced a second time, and used the character traits organizer for post reading. The children thoroughly enjoyed it. 
Another great freebie that I’ve taken advantage of comes from my friend, Erin at Mrs. Beers Language Arts. It fit perfectly since I’ve been using Close Reading Strategies with my students in both fourth and fifth grades. However, it worked best for my fifth graders due to the reading level of the text. I loved that it was an informational article since we’ve been working on summarizing strategies for nonfiction. Gail Gibbons book, The Pumpkin Book, would work well as a read aloud to compare and contrast with the article later too.
When planning out this theme, I was reminded of many favorite books. I love the book, Pumpkin Soup. It’s one that is recommended quite often as a mentor text for writing recipes. Of course From Seed to Pumpkin and Pumpkin, Pumpkin are a great ones for introducing plant life cycles, and The Biggest Pumpkin Book is always a hit for fiction.
In the activities section of my planning sheet, there are three activities that I want to point out specifically. I love Jen Runde’s 3-d pumpkins for story elements. Students love doing crafts, but at a time where content demands allow little free time, this is a nice one to do both. I also love the options available with Mel Lloyd’s Pumpkin Flapbook. I can see using this with a Halloween/Fall book of choice as a book report project.
The links I have included provide options too. The first link is to a blog post with 40+ ways to carve and use pumpkins in other lessons. For pumpkin research, All About Pumpkins offers factual information about how pumpkins grow, etc. The final link is well…just a fun little thing for students to do on your smartboard.
Before I sign off and add the linky code, I would love to share one little freebie with my fans. It’s a little poem I wrote that is part of my Fall Poetry for your Pockets set. You can use it for fluency work, for word hunts, and reviewing high frequency words.
Before you move on to your next Bloglovin post, you would probably like to see what’s coming up in the coming weeks for Thematic Thursday. I decided to map out the rest of the year using the suggestions I got from my readers. You might want to print and save this if you are a blogger and want to join in. Others may want to use it to plan centers, book choices, etc. I will be working on getting Pinterest boards made for all of them and will add to them as I have time. Remember, those who link up are added as contributors, so I hope you’ll give it a try. 
Check out this and other linky opportunities at Teacher Karma by clicking the image below.
Thank you for hosting this fun link up! I actually entered twice (I didn't use the template the first time, oops!) and added your button and link to my second post. I would love to be added to the Pinterest boards (I'm a little bit of a Pinterest addict!). Here's a link to my boards http://www.pinterest.com/jlmorello/ and my name is Jennifer Lynn @pinkpolkadotsandprek!