Five For Friday- Ten on the Sled, Tea, and Sunshine

I'm joining Doodle Bugs Teaching's Five For Friday linky party again this week!   

We have been working on measurement.  We did some work with longer/shorter, and did some non-standard measurement as well.  We measured our friends with shoes, and that was a big hit.  After measuring, the students wrote in their journals and drew about it.  They had the option to use a cloze sentence:  I am _____ shoes tall.  I also encouraged them to write about a friend and compare: I am 7 shoes tall.  Carly is 6 shoes tall.  I am taller than Carly. 

I also have a fun Arctic and Antarctic animals measuring center that is a lot of fun! 

Our special book of the week (for interactive read-alouds) was Ten on the Sled.  This is a fun book with arctic animals like caribou, hare, seal, etc.  There are ten animals on the sled and the sled keeps going faster and faster as one animal falls off at a time.  The animals fall off alliteration-style: the hare hops out, the moose muddles out, the walrus whirls out, etc.  

There were ten on the sled, and the caribou said, "Slip over! Slide over!"

So they all slid over, and Seal spilled out.

One of the activities we did was to each choose our own animal and make an alliteration action sentence.  We had some great ones, like "The dolphin dances," "The T-Rex tickles," "The lion loves." 

We also acted out the Ten on the Sled sequence.  The kiddos thought this was wonderful.  I set up 10 chairs in a row to be the sled, with an extra chair set up backward to make the front of the toboggan. 

Then we put cards with the name of each animal onto each chair in the proper order. (To make it easier for your students to say their part, write the action word on the back.  For example, on the pack of the moose card, as you can see in this picture, write the word "muddled.") 

Next, 10 students got to go onto a chair and act out that animal's part.  It was a blast.  We did it again the next day with more students participating.  

We also talked about about the meaning of "the land of midnight sun."  I love having an ipad with Apple TV and a projector.  When things like this come up I can just quickly do an image google search and show the class images of the real world that pertain to the topic.  We looked at some beautiful images of the Arctic midnight sun and had some good discussion around that.  

I have been loving using the projectable books from A-Z reading.com.  I can search for a spelling pattern or vowel or theme and find books to project for whole class reading.  I like to do one per week for a spelling rule and we do a lot of talking about it through our reading.  I also use beanie baby reading strategies, and we practice those as a whole group with the A-Z readers as well.  It also works great for sight words.  You can choose the word that you are working on and do a search to see if that word comes up in any titles, or you can just hunt around further.

My dear husband brought me flowers this week.  I will post a picture later!  We have also been drinking a lot of tea lately and I need some recommendations.  What are your favorite tea flavors?  We do have a David's Tea in town, so I might have to go and do some taste-testing :)

We are having amazing weather this week.  I live on the west coast, and so I feel bad for the east-coasters who are buried in snow.  :(  I love spring, and we're having a little taste of it right now.  It's still a bit chilly right now because it's the morning, but yesterday it was up to 12 degrees Celsius/54 degrees Fahrenheit with blue skies!  

In this pictures that I just snapped with my phone, you can see the tiny silhouette of a flying trumpeter swan.  We have a lot of them that congregate in the farmers' fields around here!

Enjoy your weekend, with whatever you are up to!  I plan to have a date with my hubby while the kiddos are with cousins, do a bit of housework (laundry NEVER ends!) and relax as much as possible. :)