Five For Friday- Community Art, Word Work, and The Recess Queen

I am happy to be linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching's Five For Friday linky party!  Here's a peek at my week! 

Our special read-aloud this week was The Recess Queen in honor of Pink Shirt Day (Anti-Bullying). We read the book and discussed what worked and what didn't work with the students in the story.  We dug in deeper and realized that the bully's name changes throughout the story.  She starts off being referred to as Mean Jean, then the friendly new girl calls her Jeanie Beanie, and then by the end she is just called Jean. 

 After we read the book a few times and talked about the vocabulary and themes a bit further, we acted out the story.  To enhance the experience, we used the Story Kit app.  I recorded different students re-telling each section of the story and we took a picture to match.  Then I typed out their words into the app.  The result is a digital book that reads aloud.  We had a blast! 

It was a testing week (one-on-one testing) so I accomplished some testing while the students watched this Arthur video.  It was entertaining and had good values and was a good conversation starter!

  We were learning about 3-D shapes this week.  I love this unit because it is a nice "break" from the usual math themes.  For our final lesson I put out 3-Dimensional shapes for discussion and then we got into a circle and took turns putting a shape into a bag while another students had their eyes closed.  They needed to only use their sense of touch to describe what they felt and then guess what shape was in the bag.  This was a fun activity.  After completing that, we went on to a drawing activity about 3-D shapes in the real world.  We also watched this quick youtube video.

 Here are some of the word work buckets that some student were working on.  

Build It

It says "you" and "said" on that container because those are two words that several of my students are really stuck on.  

 Bottle Cap Words

 Mini-Beads

 

  Magnet Words

Cuddly Buddy writing using a stuffy and my Desk Helper sheet. 

We are talking about our community.  I like incorporating social studies and science content into my morning message.  It allows me to touch on the subject matter in a brief way early in the day and then dig in deeper later.  For this day it worked out nicely to do a brainstorm of buildings in our community, and then later in the day when I introduced a related art activity, I could pull up our brainstorm and use it right away.  The initials written on the smart board are from when children "signed up" to create those specific buildings so that we could have a variety on our community mural!

 Here is our community mural in-progress...

 And here it is almost done!  

 The kids were so invested in this project.  Here is a sky-scraper in progress.  :)  We decided to extend the mural to the next bulletin board as well so that we can include a zoo and some other fun destinations!  

Here's a close-up of part of the mural:

 

Last weekend I went into Vancouver with a group of family members.  We had a great time!  Here's a little phone image from our walk downtown.  You can see that spring is starting to peek out.  As a matter of fact, the cherry blossoms emerged this week, but I don't have a picture yet!

Have a great weekend!  I will be spending time with my kids and also finishing up report cards!