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.  

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!

Five for Friday-Valentine's Week

Once again I'm happy to be linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching's Five for Friday linky party!  

This week we did a 2-day interactive read-alound using Little Mouse's Big Valentine by Thacher Hurd.  It is a cute book about a mouse who makes a huge valentine card and then finds that none of his friends want it because of its size.  He goes on a bit of an adventure and then finds another mouse friend.  Together they cut the huge valentine into a bunch of smaller ones and give them away.  

I liked some of the vocabulary in the book, so we talked about it and made a chart.  I forgot to take a picture of the chart after we added the definitions, but here is the before picture!

We worked on beginning, middle and end with this book.  I sent each student to their table with a mini sticky note and they needed to draw a picture of what happened at the beginning (we discussed it as a whole group).  When they were finished their "quick draw" they came back to the carpet area and put their sticky note under the "Beginning" title.  We repeated the process for the middle and end.  The students *loved* this activity.  It was freeing for them because it was so quick and because there was no writing involved.  I think it's important to make sure to include activities like this without writing because most students are able to easily draw a picture, and they are practicing this comprehension strategy without being slowed down by the writing process.  It's all a balance.  I loved seeing how much fun the students had with it.  Sticky notes are always fun :)

I thought that I would share how I track my guided reading group meetings.  I cannot plan my groups "in stone" because I need flexibility for how I teach and for how certain students are doing each day.  But, I want to make sure to keep tabs on how frequently I meet with each group so that I don't accidentally neglect one group.  I quickly made up this chart so that I could code the date and see how many times I've met with them.  I also write the book we are working on in case of confusion!   You can see that I haven't met equally, but it's because some groups are getting extra time because of their needs. 

Of course it was Valentine's week!  We made these cute valentine people bags to collect our cards and treats in.  I love how unique they are and the kids had a blast making them.  

We do our morning message on the Smart Board.  On Friday we talked about what "love" is.  The students came up with: Love is hugs, love is family, love is friendship, love is caring, love is Daddy working and mommy doing the laundry, love is being nice, etc. Our Valentine's Day celebration included making a booklet about what love is, making a flip book about different things that the students love (like food, activities, books, etc.), some Valentine's math, and making Valentine cards for staff members. 

  In the afternoon we watched a movie and had lots of treats. One mother even prepared a platter that had EVERYTHING cut in heart shapes.  Cucumbers, carrots, cheese, cantaloupe, and watermelon!  

Earlier in the week we did this quick math actitivity where the students used a variety of heart shapes and then had to complete the writing "I used *number* to make a *animal*.  There were a lot of owls!  Pictured below we have two owls, a butterfly, and a kitten.  I put some of them up on the bulletin board, but they will all go into a class book.

I love having at least one super-simple math center going in my rotation.  I've found that just by adding in some seasonal or unique manipulatives, a straightforward dice game becomes new and fun!  Dollar stores (and the Dollar Spot at Target) almost always have something to use!  For this game, students simply rolled the oversized dice and added the numbers together.  The player with the largest sum got to take an eraser.  At the end, whoever had the most erasers won.  Easy peasy and NO PREP, not even paper. 

Have a wonderful weekend!  I plan to spend time with my family, take some maternity photos for a friend, and hopefully spend some time outside! 

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. :)