Y'all, this week has been crazy!! Dress up days for Read Across America, a bridal shower for a sweet co-worker, my formal observation, you name it, it happened this week. That didn't stop us from having a ton of Seuss related fun though! Here's a little bit of what we did...
Of course, we had to read Green Eggs and Ham and have a taste test of green eggs. I used boiled eggs and I was surprised at how many kids loved it! After we tasted them, we graphed if we liked it then did a little opinion writing.

Wednesday was Wacky Wednesday and I had a meeting at our district office, but we did have time to read the story when I got back and chart the evidence from the story that helped prove it was a wacky day.

We also read The Lorax and used truffula trees to help us with some problem solving during math. The kids got to wear moustaches and they were so engaged!

Fox in Socks also helped us with a little problem solving. My friend Deeanna made this activity page and we drew pictures to help us solve the problem, then we wrote the equation. My kids were so excited when we got to add more than two numbers!

Today, we had a character parade as well as guest readers and my kids were so excited when a baseball player from our local junior college read to our class!

We read Bartholomew and the Oobleck this afternoon and then made our own "Ooey Gooey" that we used to test if items would sink or float. I let tables work together to make predictions then we experimented. They loved it! I think they loved it even more when we outside and they all got to play in it a little! Priceless little faces!

{Even Thing 2 loves Ooey Gooey!}

We ended the day by making hat parfaits with cool whip and red jello. Yum!!

This has been such a fun week, but I'm exhausted. I am going to clean out my TpT cart though! If you haven't take advantage of the big sale, today's the last day! You can check out my store here. If you're celebrating Read Across America next week and need the Ooey Gooey activity or some centers, you can get my Crazy Cat pack here. Happy Weekend!

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Vickie

Oh my word...this week is kicking my fanny! We are having so much fun with our Read Across America activities, and I can't wait to show you more! However, tomorrow's my formal observation, so I'm just checking in quickly to let you know that in honor of TpT being 3 million teachers strong, they're throwing a sale and I'm joining in!
I have my cart stocked with lots of fun stuff to get me thru the year...go load yours up now! You can check out my store here.

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Vickie

It's that time again!!

Is it really already time for Read Across America? This year seems to be going at warp speed and I kind of need it to slow down just a little bit! Our school celebrates Dr. You Know Who in a big way, and today we kicked off the week by reading The Cat in the Hat and wearing hats to school.
First, we read the story and discussed adjectives that describe the cat. The kids had to give me evidence to back up their adjective. This is still al ittle tricky, but we're getting there! We also made these cute cats to hold our writing. {These are a take on Kim Jordano's cats - love her stuff!}.

We also talked a lot about how Dr. Seuss used rhyming words in his stories. We did a quick little rhyming review by playing a mingle game where they kids had cards and matched up according to the rhymes. Then, we used the cards for our anchor chart. These are from my Rhyme Time Match It Up pack and are in color in the pack, but I was in a rush and just printed them in grayscale on colored cardstock. The kids love playing mingle games like this!

Then, we did some independent practice where the kids came up with two of their own rhyming pairs. They did really well with this {sometimes this is a tricky skill!}. You can get the rhyming page here.

We also started some new "Crazy Cat" workshops and I have never seen my kids more engaged! Don't ask me why, but they are loving our workshops so far this week!
We are working on word familes...

And distinguishing between real and non-sense words...

Some of us are working on beginning sound identification...

Again, we're working on rhyming words...

And, our newest workshop, the sentence scramble was a big hit...

All of these activities can be found in my Crazy Cat pack that I just updated.
Is your school celebrating this week? I'd love to hear what you're doing!

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Vickie

Did I really not blog all of last week? Oops! To say that life is moving at lightning speed this year would be an understatement. For some reason, I feel like I'm living a few days behind! {Please tell me I'm not the only one!}. I wanted to blog about our Valentine fun during the week, but that didn't happen. So, maybe you can use these ideas this week if you were snowed in on Valentine's Day or just tuck them away for next year. :)
We spent our week reading some of my favorite stories and doing lots of fun activities to go along with them. One of my favorite stories for this time of year is called Valenslime. It is a story about a girl and boy who play pranks on each other and is perfect for making predictions! We read it, and made predictions about what would happen next as we read.

We also read Somebody Loves You, Mr. Hatch, which is such a sweet story! We talked about how characters change throughout a story, then we made our own surprise valentines to deliver to people who work on our campus. The kids had a great time surprising other people!

{Proof that not all charts are cute...sometime you gotta keep it real!}

{Our science teacher, Mrs. Bannerman}

{Madelin had to write about her mom, who happens to teach 2nd grade at our school}

{Mrs. Neal, who works in our office}

Another favorite story was Froggy's First Kiss. The kids went wild over this book! We stopped before the end and predcited whether we thought Froggy would kiss Frogilina. Then, we talked about who our true valentines were and made these super cute Froggy and Frogilinas from Jennifer over at First Grade Blue Skies.

My friend Deeanna has the cutest pack that we used to make these cute mice after reading The Biggest Valentine Ever {the pack is for a different story, but includes this mouse pattern}. We reviewed the characteristics of a good friend and made a tree map together to go with our mice.

Probably my favorite story for Valentine's Day is The Valentine Bears. It is such a sweet story! We inferred how the bears felt about each other by using evidence from the story then made our bear valentine bags that we used to hold our treats and cards during our party.

Our party was Friday and we had a blast. We kept it pretty low key, but the kids had so much fun! We made cupcakes and strawberry floats {which of course were awesome because they had silly straws}. We graphed candy hearts and passed out our valentines to end the day.

{My crazy crew}

We're on to Presidents' Day this week and hopefully it won't be so long before I blog again!

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Vickie