Saturday 24 March 2012

Happy Spring Break To Me!

I just have a few pictures to share and then I am off, off, OFF for a whole week! I am leaving tomorrow for sunny (although apparently rainy tomorrow) Florida! I won't even think about school or my blog or my students AT ALL for the next seven days! Ok, that might not be true... but I am taking a break from the computer! So I won't be around for the next week and I will probably go into a bit of blogging/pinterest withdrawl.... but I'm sure I will find something to do to occupy my time!

Here are a few pictures of our Dr. Seuss finale:

I lined up all the Dr. Seuss books from my classroom library (some borrowed from my wonderful mother as well). I had the students choose their favourite book and do a little writeup about it.


When they were done, I took a picture of them holding the book, wearing the cat's hat, and standing by The Cat! They turned out so cute! I will save these and their writeups for their year-end memory books. They are adorable!!



To end our crazy Seuss week off, we read "I Am NOT Going To Get Up Today!", wore our pajamas, brought our pillows and stuffies, and ended the day with a movie. We watched "Horton Hears a Who!" I love the book, but had never seen the movie before. I actually really enjoyed it! I loved the voices of Jim Carrey and Steve Carrell. Funny stuff! I burst out laughing when Katie says, "In my world everyone is a pony, and they all eat rainbows, and poop butterflies." Oh man. Hilarious! I know... I have the sense of humour of a six-year-old... Can you blame me?

But before we started the movie, we concluded our five senses unit with some fun science observations! First we made Seuss Juice and completed Cara's cute How To Writing and Five Senses Observation from over at The First Grade Parade. I added a little Seuss fun to the drink... I made blue ice cubes from blue Koolaid. The kids loved 'em!!


Then what's a movie without popcorn?? We used our senses to observe the popcorn BEFORE and AFTER a change (heat) occurred. Unfortunately my faithful old popcorn popper decided to die on me THAT INSTANT and only pop half a bowl of popcorn!! Uh oh!! Luckily I had left over Fruit Loops from 100 Day, so a tiny handful of popcorn and some cereal and they were happy campers!


We also did this cute Seuss fish art project from Deep Space Sparkle (love her ideas!!) and I think they turned out really cute! Even my not-so-artistically-gifted students created a cute and unique fish! Although this project did remind me why I hate glitter so much... It gets everywhere!!




Well, that's it for now! I need to get some sleep (if that is possible) before we leave tomorrow. I feel like a kid at Christmas. Yipee!! Happy Spring Break and I will see ya when I return!

(This was from "Wacky Wednesday".)

Tuesday 20 March 2012

Happy Spring!

It is way past my bedtime, but it is officially Tuesday, March 20th, and the first day of spring! So...

How's that for glitter-tastic?

I am down to four days left before Spring Break and I am so excited! My kiddos definitely need a little break from school and from each other. And I know I need a little break, too! My patience is starting to wear a little thin in some places.... Please don't ask me every two minutes if you have to wear a jacket outside... I don't care!! :P

I will be heading to sunny Florida for my Spring Break and will not be doing an ounce of school work! So that means I am trying to get things ready for the week we come back. (Look at me trying to pretend I'm all organized and such... hehe!) Well to get me started I created a few Easter-themed word work activities to bring us into the beginning of April. You can check it out in my TpT store. Click the picture to take you there!


There are five fun centers to use during literacy stations or Daily 5. They are:

1. Making Words with "Easter Bunny"
2. Unscrambled Eggs {unscramble the Easter words}
3. Funny Bunny Long Vowel Sort {real vs. nonsense CVCe words}
4. Write the Room
5. Egg-cellent Sentences {unscramble the sentences}


I hope they come in handy for someone! I know I am looking forward to using them!

Good Night and Happy Spring!

Saturday 17 March 2012

St. Patrick's Day and the Five Senses {freebies included}

Report cards are sent home and I can finally breathe a sigh of relief! One more week and it's SPRING BREAK!! I am so excited I can hardly stand it!

So for our St. Patty's activities we did a little Lucky Charms graphing. The sorting mat and graph were ones I got from Teacher's Clubhouse a few years back.


Then we did another little measurement activity I created. The kiddies had so much fun measuring with unifix cubes, so I created some shamrock rulers for them to use to measure. First they measured random classroom objects (estimate first, measure second) using the rulers to see how many shamrocks long these objects were. Then I made four leprechaun footprints (just using green construction paper) and hung them around the classroom.



I know it's a little late, but if you want to save this activity for next year, just click the pictures to download. The rulers are on 8x14" paper. I printed them on large manilla tag/card stock and let the kids colour them.



Then I wanted to create some cute leprechauns inspired by The First Grade Parade and Primary Perspective. Instead of making faces, I used photographs of my kiddies, just printed in black and white. They turned out so cute! We included the writing prompt "I feel lucky when..." I got some pretty sweet responses.


There's my silly example! :)

In Science we have been studying our five senses. We started off with this little anchor chart. I told the kids he was my friend named Bob. Now they talk about Bob all the time. "Does Bob like pickles? Does Bob know how to swim?" lol. It's pretty amusing!


Each day this week we talked about a different sense. I would start by reading one of these books. They are really cute and give good scientific info too. By the fifth day/book, my kids KNOW that nerves send messages to our brain. It was cute to hear them talking about it.


The first day we talked about sight. We played a game of "I Spy" and drew a labelled diagram of our eye in our Science journal. Then we graphed our eye colour. I got the little eye cards from some teacher resource book during my student teaching days... not even sure where it came from!




The next day we talked about hearing. We did this "What do you hear?" activity. I downloaded nine free sound effects from AudioMicro and played them through my school computer. (They are mp3 files so you could burn them to a CD and play them on your stereo as well.) They were sounds like wind, horse walking, water dripping, bacon frying, etc. Students made a guess and either drew a picture or wrote the word for what they thought made that sound. Then I would tell them the answer. If they were right, they put a check in the yes circle. If they were wrong, they put an x in the no circle. These are four mystery senses pages I created for our activities. Feel free to download them by clicking on the picture.


Then we talking about smell. I had 6 mystery cups with 6 stinky smells {lemon, orange, onion, perfume, coffee, and vinegar}. I placed cotton balls on top of the item and covered the cup with wax paper helf with an elastic. I poked a few holes on top to let the smell through. Same as the hearing activity, students drew/wrote their guesses. We also voted on who liked/disliked the smells.



Our touch day was a lot of fun. I combined it with our Dr. Seuss activities and read the book "Bartholomew and the Oobleck". We made our own oobleck and used our sense of touch to describe it. 





Then in Science we did a mystery bag activity. I had 12 paper bags with a mystery object inside. By using their sense of touch they had to figure out what the object was and draw/write their guess down. I had things like an apple, hockey puck, juice box, glue stick, q tip {that was a hard one!}, domino, etc.


Our taste day happened to fall on Friday, our St. Patrick's Day so I turned our taste test into a GREEN taste test! I made this huge tongue poster and we talked about our taste buds. {I did talk about bitter taste buds, where they were located and some foods that would be bitter, but we didn't try any of them.} Then we tasted one food at a time: a slice of green apple, a pickle, a green candy, a crinkle -cut veggie chip, a dill pickle Crisper, and a green marhsmallow. We wrote down the food, coloured in the taste buds, and circled if we liked or not.





It was a busy, but fun week! Next week is our dress-up Dr. Seuss week: Silly Hat Day, Favourite Colour Day, Wacky Hair Wednesday, Crazy Sock Day, and Sleepy Pajama Day! Have a great weekend, everyone!

Monday 12 March 2012

12 on the 12th

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for her first 12 on the 12th linky party! I love this idea! I was lucky to have an admin. day today {no kiddies!} to work on my report cards, so I just carried my trusty iPhone around with me and snapped some random shots of my day! Here we go...


1. Piles and piles of student work/assessments that are finally corrected and ready to send home!

2. My favourite non-teaching blog is Cake Wrecks. I love the constipated Angry Birds today. Funny stuff!

3. Bella enjoying the beautiful spring weather! Normal high for today would be -2°C (28°F) but today it got up to 8°C (46°F)! So nice!! 

4. Due to the beautiful weather we are expecting this week, we vowed to BBQ every night this week! Chicken breast last night, steak tonight... Maybe smokies tomorrow?

5. Still having a blast with our Dr. Seuss activities this week!

6. This is the view from my classroom this afternoon. Last week there was at least two feet of snow back there. Today... grass!! 

7. We are studying our five senses in Science right now. This was a mystery sound activity we did last week. I will post some five senses freebies later this week!

8. Here is our math problem all ready to go for tomorrow morning. Starting the week off with some leprechaun fun!

9. This is my daily cute-ness calendar. I liked this picture because the orange tabby looks just like my Oscar kitty when he was younger! He has also been known to knock the coffee pot over and get coffee/grinds EVERYWHERE! 

10. Our weekly graph this week is "Do you believe in leprechauns?" I will be interested to see if I have any believers ;)

11. Here is what my SpongeBob bulletin board looked like, all covered in Krabby Patties. Our goal was to read 210 books for home reading, and we ended up reading over 450! They did an awesome job! I finally took down SpongeBob to get the board ready for...

12. A Lucky Bunch of Leprechauns! We'll be writing about when we feel lucky and making ourselves into leprechauns! They should turn out cute! I'll post pics when they are done.

And that's my random 12! I'm off to watch SMASH (one of my new fave shows) and try to finish up these reports! Good night everyone!

Friday 9 March 2012

In Like a Lion, Out Like a Lamb! {Hopefully!!!}

Sorry I have been neglecting everyone for the last week! I am swamped with assessments and report cards, and to top it all off, I have been blessed with a terrible cold! Gotta love winter! Fingers crossed for an early spring!

I did want to give a big thank you to everyone who supported my Leap Day sale at TpT! I truly appreciate all of your sweet comments, too!

I just have a couple quick things to share with you tonight! At the beginning of the month, we talked about the saying, "In like a lion, out like a lamb." We read this little poem by Lorie Hill, then brainstormed characteristics of a lion and lamb. Then we talked about what it meant if the weather was like a lion or lamb. We predicted whether or not we thought March was going to come in like a lion or lamb!


On March 1st we ended up having very lamb-like weather, but the 2nd was a big snow storm, so I'm hoping that was the lion and we are on our way to a beautiful spring now!

We made these cute and easy paper plate crafts. We painted one plate yellow with an orange border and the other we painted black (although a few students wanted to leave their lambs white). Then when they dried we added googley eyes, construction paper noses and ears, and cotton balls.





I just punched holes at the top and hung them back to back. Easy and super cute!

Also, here's a quick little measurement activity I whipped up this week. The students used unifix cubes to do some non-standard measuring activities. First they measured the length of lines. Then they measured the area of squares and rectangles. Finally they went around to measure the length of the "inch worms" I had hidden around the room. There are 6 different worms for them to find and measure. My kiddies had so much fun with this whole activity! I will definitely have to make some more of these! Yay for fun math! If you would like a copy of the activity, click the picture of the worksheet to download it for free!





Well that's it for tonight! I'm going to relax with the puppy tonight and watch some cheesey chick flicks on tv! Good night everybody!