Easter and Spring

Easter is almost here!  I love this time of year.  The weather is getting warmer, the leaves are uncurling on the trees, and the spring flowers are in full bloom!

The days are getting longer and we spend way more time outside.  It's so glorious! It's a great time of the year to study and explore shadows and light.   

In the classroom it's a time of reflecting on how far we've come and making goals that we plan on meeting before the end of the school year.  Our art comes alive with bright colours and insects and creepy crawlies are always a favourite.

Some of our work inside is Spring and Easter themed and it is such a welcome change from penguins and snowmen.  

It's a fun time to try out a new Easter-themed "I Have, Who Has" game. 

We work on some rhyming review.

And we also practice our 100 chart fluency. 

We continue our work on 2 digit numbers (those teen numbers are tricky for some of my littles.)

If you want to check out this Spring and Easter bundle, click the picture below.

Enjoy the season, wherever you are, and whatever your weather!  Thanks for stopping by.  

Winter Activities

Here is a fun roundup of some of my favorite activities to do in the winter!

Penguin Art activity.  Find the full step-by-step tutorial here. 

Arctic and Antarctic Measuring and Sorting. 

Greater Than and Less Than review

Free Choice Watercolor painting for morning work. 

3 day Interactive Read-Aloud of "Bear Has a Story to Tell."  We have also enjoyed doing popsicle stick puppets for re-telling.  You can download some for free here.  

3 Day Interactive Read-Alouds.  Pictures for this anchor chart can be downloaded directly from Jan Brett's Website.  

I hope you enjoyed these ideas and can use some of them in your classroom!  

Alphabet Practice for K/1

My little firstie-to-be is spending some time practicing her basic skills in anticipation of starting first grade.  She's having fun this morning!

This is part of my alphabet mini-bundle.

These are great for independent work time, because each page follows a similar format.  They each contain cut and paste components, tracing, printing, and phonemic awareness.  

Five For Friday- Manyoni, Estimation, and Magic Sand

It's Friday!! (No wait, it's Saturday, but I started writing this post on Friday!).  Anyway, I'm happy to be linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for the Five For Friday Linky.  Here's what I've been up to this week!

Our interactive read-aloud this week was "Where are You Going, Manyoni?"  On Day One I read the book aloud and we discussed some of the unfamiliar words used for the landscape and plants.  We also discussed the similarities and differences between Manyoni's school and ours.  

On Day Two we discussed some of the "fancy" English vocabulary before re-reading the book.  

On Day Three, we re-read the book, and recorded a chart listing all of the different places that Manyoni went, starting at home and finishing at school.  The students each chose one to illustrate and cut out of paper. Some students worked together to create their area.  Then we got together and created a large (as big as a bulletin board) map of Manyoni's path.  I can't even express to you how "magical" this activity was.  The students were so engaged and so excited about this collaborative project.  

I think that the final result is so beautiful.  The students labeled the different areas on pocket chart poem paper and then glued them on to match the areas.  Each child also drew an arrow on a small piece of paper and glued them to show the path that Manyoni took.  (The actual geographic relationship between the places on her path is made up by us because there isn't a map in the book, but the students didn't mind or even notice).  

We also did a whole class and a pair-share talk about how we are like Manyoni.  Then the students wrote about it in their journals.  Some of the ideas we came up with were:

-I am like Manyoni because I like the morning too.

-I am like Manyoni because I walk to school too. 

-I am like Manyoni because I eat porridge for breakfast sometimes.

-I am like Manyoni because I get to walk alone.

-I am like Manyoni because I get to school early.

-I am like Manyoni because I like my teacher.

--I am like Manyoni because I get to play with my friends at school.  

I love doing surveys as part of our morning meeting time.  The students enjoy being able to express their opinions and of course using the smart board is always inviting. In regards to this particular survey, I wanted to know which poems my students like the most out of the ones we had done that week or so.  We are using poems from Hello Literacy and they are PERFECT for my kiddos.  They are short four-line poems and my students are soaking them up and so eager to read them aloud.  I have put them into my students' home-school communication BEE books so that they can read them at home, and we keep the small coordinating printing books in our book boxes so that we can read them during Daily Five and bring them out for printing time.   This is one of my favorite purchases I've made lately.

The kiddos love this magic sand center.  One of my little ones uses it as a calming strategy.  If you haven't tried this out, it's so relaxing!

We were doing estimating this week, and then we counted the items using ten frames. 

How cute is this snowman chalk drawing my little girl made?  We only had snow for one or two days here this winter, so she has to make snowmen in a different way.  

And I just thought it was adorable how my son was engrossed in his Scholastic flyer while we were driving.  Rest assured, I wasn't in the driver's seat :)

Have a wonderful weekend!  I have one more week to go until Spring Break.  So exciting!!

Be sure to check out some more Five For Friday posts at the link-up at Doodle Bugs.

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!