Clouds!

My kids have been SOOO into learning about clouds the past few days! On recess duty I overheard some of them saying, "Look at those Cumulus clouds! It's going to be a nice day!" Love it!

If you are teaching about clouds you must read

It is very informative and leads right into the characteristics of just about every cloud!

We focused on the following clouds: Cumulus, Nimbus, Stratus, and Cirrus. After much reading and discussing, we made a chart together to compare the four types of clouds. Excuse the handwriting and crooked lines! This was definitely a quick, last minute thing :)

I borrowed this adorable idea from The Inspired Apple to illustrate the four clouds:

Aren't those cloud friends just the cutest? What a great visual aid to show where each cloud belongs in the sky! All of my kids now know that Cirrus clouds are the highest and that Stratus clouds are like a low, gray blanket in the sky :)

 Of course my kids were practically begging for their own cloud friends, so they each wrote about the four clouds and made their own mini cloud friends. They turned out so cute!! I am so proud of their writing--many of them needed TWO sheets of paper for their writing, which is a BIG deal for them :)

So, so cute :)

The Water Cycle!

Yeah, yeah. I know it has been awhile since I last posted!! As I said in my last post, I was gone a few days before spring break, and last week was the first week back and I felt like I was just trying to get caught up! I fiiiinally feel somewhat caught up (even with it being conference week!!!)

We started our weather unit for science last week. The kids are sooo into it! We have been reading a LOT of nonfiction books about different kinds of weather, and many of my kiddos are checking out weather books in the library to share with the class! Love it!

We have been focusing a lot on the water cycle. Everyday we have been singing this little song with hand motions that goes to the tune of She'll Be Comin' Around the Mountain... It goes like this:

"Water travels in a cycle yes it does,

 Water travels in a cycle yes it does.

(move hands around in circle)

 It goes up as evaporation.

(palms up, rise hands up to head)

 It forms clouds as condensation.

(form cloud-like shape over head)

 It falls down as precipitation, yes it does!

(wiggle fingers and make hands go down like it's raining)

I promise my kids will know the water cycle for the rest of their lives because of this song :)

I made this water cycle poster for our weather bulletin board:

We have done a lot of reading about the water cycle. We made little moveable water cycle diagrams. We also sequenced and illustrated the steps of it.  As with many science concepts, just reading about the water cycle was a little difficult for my kiddos to really visualize, so I found a great Bill Nye video about it, and I heard a lot of, "OHHH!!! I get it now!"

After spending a few days on it, I had my kids write about the water cycle and illustrate it using yarn, sequins, and cotton balls. They did a fabulous job :)

My kids' parents just loved these at conferences tonight! :)

We are going to start learning about different kinds of clouds in the next week or so! I am really excited :)



Spring Break!

I feel like it has been forever since I posted! About a week before spring break I found out that my grandpa passed away, so I flew out to Hartford, CT to spend time with my dad's family and attend the funeral. It was really nice seeing everyone out there, even though the circumstances stunk.

If you're a teacher, you know that it can be stressful leaving your class with a sub! I had to leave them for THREE DAYS. But lucky for me, my former student teacher was available!!! So I had ZERO worries :) I honestly think I would have had a panic attack had she not been able to cover for me!!

I haven't done a whoooole lot over spring break, and I am sad it's coming to an end! It's been pretty laid back and relaxing. Shopping, hanging out with girlfriends, playing with Lulu... it's been nice. I went up to school yesterday with my friend Amy and we planned for the next couple of weeks. I'm excited to start our weather unit! I will post ideas as we go along :) I also got to bring home 3 days worth of work to grade :) So I guess I know what I will be doing today!

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Dr. Seuss Week: Days 3-5

Day 3 of our unit was Dr. Seuss' birthday, and all birthdays MUST have cupcakes! :)

Our focus book for Day 3 was:

I just LOVE this book because it teaches SUCH a great lesson on preserving the environment. My kiddies were SO into this book and we had a fantastic discussion afterward. We discussed how the Once-ler hurt the environment, and the kids were really kind of mad at him for cutting down all the beautiful truffula trees and for hurting the animals' habitats! 

After we read the book I asked to kids to each write a letter to the Once-ler telling him why he should not cut down the truffula trees (great mini-lesson on friendly letter format!) They came up with the CUTEST letters to the Once-ler!

I took their letters home and mailed them to the Once-ler :) When I got to school the next morning, I checked my box, and guess what?! He wrote us back!! (We had some seriously express mail lol) The kids were soooo excited to find a big letter from him!

Inside the envelope he also sent us some Truffula Seeds to plant! We decided to go plant them by the fence on the playground.

I just LOVED this activity! My friend, Mrs. B, and I came up with it last minute the night before!! I am SOOOO glad we thought of it! Next year we want to have a little packet of seeds for each child to take home with a cute little note or poem attached to it :)

Day 4 our focus book was:

This book is great for reviewing nouns (even though they are silly ones!) We each graphed the number of pockets that each student in our class had. Then we interpreted the data in many different ways. We also worked on our flip books. I completely forgot to take pictures of these little activities! Boo!

Throughout the week, I met with each of my small reading groups. On normal weeks, the books we read are leveled, but this week was a fun week, so we all read

And really, what kid doesn't love The Cat in the Hat??! :)

We worked on our descriptive writing by designing a new hat for The Cat and writing a detailed description of it. I hung all of the hats up on the board and each child got to read his/her description. Then the class had to try and guess that child's hat based on his/her description.

During the writing process I told them that the goal was for their classmates to be able to picture the hat in their heads, and to be able to figure out which hat it was in just one guess. Some of them wrote the most detailed descriptions ever! This was a fun activity for my kiddos.

Day 5:

We read this in the morning and completed our flip books (posted a little ways down!!) You cannot read this book and NOT make oobleck! So in the afternoon we did a science investigation with oobleck!

We first discussed the differences between solids and liquids, and the kids had a great conversation going.

As a class we predicted whether we thought oobleck was solid or liquid based on what it looked like, and what we knew about solids and liquids.

I made a record sheet for the kids (which I am not quite sure how to load on here yet!). They predicted whether a cotton ball, yarn, a penny, a paper clip and a pipe cleaner would sink or float in the oobleck. Then they recorded their results.

 I had them stir the oobleck with a popsicle stick very slooooowly and very quickly and record what happened each time. They learned that when they stirred it slowly that it was easy and felt like a liquid. But when they stirred it quickly it was just the opposite!

Then they got to feel the oobleck. I had them poke it over and over again very fast-they thought it was a solid! Then I had them touch it very sloooowly-they thought it was a liquid!

It was soooo fun to listen to their discussions about why it was a liquid and why it was a solid. We never did figure out which it was!! Oobleck has properties of both a solid and a liquid!! It was a great science lesson!

**I strongly suggest having another adult (or two!) help you prepare the oobleck and help during this lesson!! Thank you to my former student teacher for helping!! :)**

Since the week is over, my kids turned in their flip books. They included rhyming pairs from each book, a sentence or two stating their opinion of each book, and a picture from the book.

And here is what my mini bulletin board looked like this week :) I included the Reader's Oath (which each child signed!) and we kept track of allllll the Dr. Seuss books we read together this week!! Very simple and not a lot of prep time :)

15 books in one week... not too shabby :) We have LOTS more that the kids want to continue reading next week, and I am soooo okay with it!      “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.” --Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss: Day Two

I am not gonna lie. I did not do as many Dr. Seuss-ish activities today as I would have liked. We've had a lot of catching up to do. And I soooo did not realize until the weekend that spring break is only TWO weeks away, not THREE! It was a pleasant surprise, don't get me wrong! But this made me realize that I have GOT to get my booty in gear!

Today was an EGG-cellent day :) Had I been paying a little more attention, I would have read these books tomorrow, when our cafeteria will be serving green eggs and ham for lunch! Oh well, what can ya do? Anyway... We read these two books today: 

We talked about the things we did not like, picked out rhyming pairs and added to our flip books. Like I said, we didn't do a WHOLE lot this morning. Wah.

In the afternoon, we played a game I like to call "Scrambled Eggs!" This game can easily be modified for any grade level and for many skills. I stocked up on plastic Easter eggs one year when they were on clearance for about $0.15 a bag. Inside each egg I put a slip of paper with a math problem on it (ours happen to have 2-digit addition and subtraction problems, with and without regrouping). I split the kids in two groups (waaay more manageable this way!) and give them a piece of paper to record their work. They bring their clipboards to their group and sit in a circle. I put a couple handfuls of eggs in the middle of the circle and when I say the secret word, "Scramble!" they grab an egg, copy down the problem and solve it. They have about 30 seconds or so for each egg. When I say, "Eggs!" all eggs go back in the middle. We repeated this about 10 or 12 times. They had a lot of fun working on their math skills in this way :)

We will see where the rest of the week brings us :)

Dr. Seuss: Day One!

Today we began our Dr. Seuss unit and I am so excited! I always get so pumped about this unit. One of my favorite things is just getting to read the many, MANY books aloud to my kiddos. They love the rhythm of the books, the illustrations, and the overall silliness of Dr. Seuss :) And I agree with them 100%!

Throughout the week I will read stories to them at morning meeting and as we have a few extra minutes here and there, but each day we will have one focus book that I base the majority of our activities around.

Today we started by making invitations to a birthday party for Dr. Seuss (did you know he'd be 107 this year?!) My kiddos got to decide when and where the party would be! They enjoyed this quick little activity, and their invitations turned out cute.

Today our focus book was:

This is one of my favorite books to read aloud because it is one giant tongue twister! I read it at a normal pace first (which is hard in itself!) The kids ALWAYS challenge me to read it as fast as I can a second time, and of course this year was no different. After reading it twice, I always show my kiddies a You-Tube video I found and recorded onto CD a couple of years ago of the entire book being read in about 3 minutes flat! I love watching their little faces as they watch/listen in complete awe at how quickly the book is read!

After we read the book, we did some word sorts for -ix/-icks words and -ox/-ocks words.

With each of our focus books, we will add a section to our "Dr. Seuss Flip Book." In the flip book, students are required to think of at least 5 rhyming pairs from each book, write their opinion of the book, and draw a picture of their favorite part of the book.

**I will post a photo of a completed flip book at the end of the week**

More posts to come later in the week!

Penguins!

Sooo.... I know it is almost March, but we have been working hard on our penguin unit this week! Better late than never, right?! The kids are having a blast with it and they are learning so much! I love seeing how engaged they are :)

My faaabulous student teacher subbed for me at the beginning of the week, so I missed our first day of the unit, but she did an AWESOME job! To begin the week, the kids brainstormed what they THOUGHT they knew about penguins. And boy, did they already know a lot!

(I borrowed this cute idea from The First Grade Parade).

 **We have not completed "Our New Learning" yet-we will tomorrow! :)**

We read Cinderella Penguin for two days this week. We learned some new vocabulary and made Venn Diagrams comparing it with the classic version of Cinderella. We have really been focusing on reading nonfiction books this week, and the kids are so into it!

We learned that Rockhopper Penguins lay 3 eggs each year and that Adelie Penguins lay 2 eggs each year. So, I had the kids write story problems and illustrate how many eggs one of those penguins would lay in X amount of years. Great practice for repeated addition/multiplication :)

Before reading one of our nonfiction books (National Geographic for Kids: Penguins!), I gave each child a notecard. I wrote the word "regurgitate" on the board and asked them to write what they thought it meant. They had a hard time figuring it out at first when the word was isolated. Once I put it into a sentence, many of them had an A-HA moment (great mini lesson on context clues!). We all came to the carpet and I read their responses (some were so creative!). Then we read the book, and I told them to pay close attention and see if we could find out what our new vocabulary word meant. And sure enough, we found out (photo and all!) Their reactions were great!

We spent a lot of time on new vocabulary this week. I happened to have this great penguin vocabulary activity that turns out so cute! I wrote 8 vocabulary words on the board that we needed to learn the meanings of (some we had already learned in other books we had read). Then we read Penguin Chick. As we came across those words, I recorded them on paper along with their meanings. Then we completed this cute little penguin!

The kids thought it was the coolest thing ever! The loved how it all folded up under his little wing. I even overheard some of them saying, "I can't wait to teach so-and-so when I get home!" (Just what every teacher wants to hear!!!)

Today we worked on facts and opinions. We talked about how facts can be proven and that not everyone has the same opinion (not everyone will agree with you!) We brainstormed facts and opinions about penguins and I recorded their responses on these cute little guys (excuse the handwriting!!).

Then, the kids wrote their own facts and opinions (or, "options," as they kept calling them) about penguins! They were required to do three facts and three opinions, but many students went above and beyond, doing two, three, even four sheets! WOW! And of course they had to make their own little penguin to accompany their awesome writing!

I thought these turned out so CUTE! (And look-he even added the barbed tongue!) I am very proud of their work!

Tomorrow we are going to close our unit by reading The Emperor's Egg and making penguin fact books. We have had a lot of fun this week with this unit :) I can't wait to add new ideas next year! Speaking of....

Last night I thought of an idea that I wish I had thought of earlier!! I want make several penguins that are the actual height of the different species of penguins and then have my kids measure them in inches and centimeters. It will take quite a bit of preparation, but it'd be worth it!

Time to go eat dinner now :) Can't wait to share some Dr. Seuss ideas next week!