What We've Been Up To

We've been having so much fun this past week digging into some of my favorite themes! We kicked off our week by making our guesses about what we thought the groundhog would see. The kids loved this activity and they did so well writing about their data! {This is part of my groundhog pack} One thing I've started doing this year that I love is to have the kids tell me what they notice about our data {written on the easel under our graph} before I ask them any questions.

After we watched the news to see what the groundhog predicted, we wrote about it and made these so, so cute groundhogs from my sweet friend Heidi.

Tuesday, we started reading some of my favorite Valentines stories - there are so many good ones!! I love reading the ones about friends, since this about the time of year when we *sometimes* forget what being a good friend means.

First, we read The Biggest Valentine Ever {my kids love this series of books!}. It led us into a conversation about friendship. We made a little tree map about friends, then made the valentine mouse that Clayton and Desmond made in the book. The kids thought it was so cool that they could replicate the mouse from the story!

Another of my favorite stories is Silly Tilly's Valentine. It's perfect for finding text evidence! My kids did a great job of finding evidence as to why Tilly was silly.

After reading the story, I wanted my kids to practice "argument" writing. I wrote all my students' names on slips of paper and each child drew a friend to write about. They had to give evidence that showed why their person was a good friend. Y'all - it was so sweet!!

"She is nice to me because she shares"

"He never left my side. You know why - because he is my friend."

{He shares with his snack and he plays with me}

Probably the favorite story of the week was Froggy's First Kiss. The kids were rolling in laughter the whole time! After we read the story, we wrote about who our true valentine is and made these PRECIOUS Froggy and Frogilina from Jenn - so, so cute!!

{My Ms. Plant - melt my heart!}

Friday, we took a break from learning about 3D shapes in math and used a special snack to practice graphing. I mean, what's better than practicing math concepts with Valentine M&Ms?? When we do graphs, I usually always pre-sort whatever we're working with. It takes a little extra time, but it helps a lot! I love having my kids work with a variety of graph types, so this time, I made our bar graph go horizontal. You can grab the graph here as a freebie. :)