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".)

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!