Ocean Fun!

We are taking the Stanford 10 test this week {ask me how much fun it is to get 18 precious little dears to all sit still and quiet and listen for an hour + every morning especially when we move around constantly on a normal day}, so in the afternoons, we've been having fun learning about ocean life.
Monday, we learned about crabs {with the help of a little internet research}. We made these precious crabs from Kinder by Kim and then made crab fact books to go on the inside. If you've never been over to Kim's website or blog, you have to!! Her stuff is so super cute!

Tuesday, we investigated shells. Last summer, my family and I went on a little beach trip and to say we got a few shells for me to use at school is a little bit of an understatement {when my family does something, we go all out :)}! I let the kids each pick a shell then talk about words that describe their shell with their shoulder partners. Then, we made a big list of describing words which was a little confusing for some since some of the words didn't describe their specific shell. We followed up with the kids doing their own descriptive writing. You can get the writing page here.

The beach is only about an hour away and has the best shells!

Today, we learned about sea turtles. The kids thought they were so neat! We made a big sea turtle to hold our shared writing then the kids each made their own sea turtle with a fact.

{Don't be jealous of the wood paneling in the portable :) }

We're also using our ocean centers whenever we get a spare second...you can get them here on TpT.
Tomorrow we'll be learning about starfish after the listening portion of our Stanford 10...we'll see how well it goes after being cooped up all week with no PE because of rain :). I'm off to make grape salad {one of my favorites!} for a team member's baby shower tomorrow.
If you didn't catch all the fun on Instagram yesterday, be sure to go over and check out #teachertalktuesday! Lots of great pics and ideas! You can follow Mrs. Plant's Press while you're there too...happy middle of the week!