Five for Friday 4/18/14 Bear Unit

Happy Easter weekend everyone, that's right teachers summer break is just around the corner!! I'm enjoying my day off and have taken to cleaning out one of my storage areas in my classroom and I'm so happy that it looks sooo much better. Spring cleaning really helps me feel more organized and lessens my clean up efforts at the end of the school year. Linking up with Doodlebug for Five for Friday!

One

This week was all about bears! We are going on a field trip on Earth Day to go see Disneynature's Bears movie. It's been our tradition to watch each Disneynature movie when it comes out and usually I don't do a unit but with two four day weeks in a row I wouldn't be able to do language arts curriculum, not to mention all the spring fever and energy I'm getting with my peaches. So we learned all about grizzly bears while the older peaches learned about their favorite bear. I used three different units from TPT. Thanks to Elaine Swansey, I Love My Kinders, and Rachelle Smith; my peaches had a blast learning about grizzly bears.At the end of our studies I asked questions ,wrote down my kindergarteners responses, and helped my first graders phonetically sound out their answers. In the end, thanks to I Love My Kinders, they had very cute bear reports. Now we're all ready to go see Disneynature's Bears on Tuesday!

My favorite bear, my kinder definitely shows her personality

Two

We had our spring celebration on Thursday and I was in charge of a craft. So I took to Pinterest and found these cute sock bunnies. They were super easy to make and the peaches loved them. They were super creative with adding carrots, ribbon, braids and bringing their personality to the craft. 

Three

We also had an egg hunt and it was so fun to watch my little peaches look for eggs. It was even more exciting for them to watch the older peaches look for their eggs. They couldn't help but follow them around and ask if they needed help

Four

As I was cleaning out my classroom I decided to clean my little peaches cubbies and found a treasure of legos in one of their cubbies. I'm happy I got to clean my room before summer break hits. I wish I took some before pictures but you'll just have to trust that it was a hot mess. Here are the results:

Our incubator is all ready for the chicks we're hatching next month!

Five

 


We had a lovely visitor on Thursday, a gopher snake! I saw my first grader backing up from the playhouse area and thought he was running away from a bee. He quickly shouted he saw a snake and pointed it out to us. A swarm of peaches came over to gawk at the large snake. We had fun following him, from a safe distance, until he burrowed into the ground again.

That's it for now! One more bonus photo, me and my sisters during Easter YEARS ago.

Let the countdown to summer BEGIN!!

- Ms. Perry

Wordless Wednesday

Would your students know how to use this rotary phone? 
Do they know what a dial tone is? 
- One answer I got was a dial tone was a type of phone (Kinder) 
 Linking up with Miss DeCarbo at Sugar and Spice

Five for Friday which turned into Weekend Update!

One

After checking my bloglovin’ notifications I saw Mrs. Jump's class had a new posting. At first I wrote it off but the title was too interesting, “…Now I know my ABC’s, next time won’t you SING with me!” Such a simple and catchy tune that all kids know and love! Since I teach kindergarten and first grade, I thought “alright another great resource.” After starting to read the blog I realized she had a special guest blogger talking about how the alphabet song doesn’t help readers learn alphabet sounds, GASP! She explains how readers (k-2) need exposure to all spelling patterns and letter sounds. She also talked about the brain and how songs help us remember but the muscle memory incorporated with the better alphabet song engages the memory that helps us remember how to ride a bike or skip. SO this better alphabet song will teach students the sounds AND it will be stored for life! Awesome! After watching some of Katie Garner’s Vlogs I was so impressed that I purchased the vertical alphabet so I could teach my kids the better alphabet song.

Two

I love spring! The flowers, the baby animals, and the weather. This past week we had lots of rain. The rain brought rainbows and puffy clouds. Here are the two pictures I took that describe this past week.

Three

 This week I used Kinder Cakes Easter Bunny Real Words and Nonsense Words Sort. But I didn’t want to just hand them out and sort them.

Materials

1.       Easter basket

2. Easter eggs ($2.00 at Target for 48)

3.   Kinder Cakes Resource

Instructions:

Cut out the real and nonsense words

Fold and place into plastic eggs

Hide eggs around the room and have an egg hunt

After all the eggs are collected go through each word and sort on the board

I feel like the peaches were more engaged and had fun sounding out the nonsense words.

Four

Last weekend a bunch of bloggers had a Hop and Shop where they had a few freebies of some of their products. I got a lot of good resources and will be back to shop later. 

Five

The big excitement this week at our school… a baby jackrabbit!  The bunny was too cute and the peaches were so fascinated with it during recess, they even got me lying on the ground looking for him. We hope he makes it through the weekend, but as of now she/he has taken up residency under our storage shed.