Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Could you hear my kids squealing with excitement this afternoon? We love each other dearly, but we are all over the moon excited about spring break! The weather here is perfect and I can't wait to spend a week playing with my sweet girl!
For the past month or so, I have been reading The Wizard of Oz with my class. We finished it up a week ago and to say that they were obsessed with the book would be an understatement! They loved it, and they especially loved finding differences between the book and the movie most of them had seen. It was actually my first time reading it and I enjoyed it too! To celebrate finishing the book, we had a week of Oz and rainbow fun!
We started with some literacy workshops, which the kids were so engaged with {it's amazing what cute clipart can get a kid to do!}. We worked on word families, long and short vowel sounds, sight words, and good/wicked words {I didn't snap a picture of the last one, but they loved it!}. These are part of my Wizard of Oz mini pack, along with lots of graphic organizers and writing pages.

We also used my amazingly talented friend, Kristen's, Weather and Making Predictions packs to have some rainbow fun. My kids love any time I say that we're doing a science experiment and these were a hit!
First, we learned the colors of the rainbow with her cute Roy G Biv craft.

We started our experiments by seeing what would happen if we sprayed rainbow colored vinegar on baking soda...they loved that their predictions were close or right!

We also did a rainbow cloud experiment where we put shaving cream as our cloud on top of water and dropped colored water into it. The pictures turned out no so great because we were on the rug, but the kids loved this one also!

By far, the most favorite was probably the "Walking Water" experiment. We took two cups of colored water and put them on a bucket then put two cups underneath, with a paper towel between them. The kids loved going to check how far the water had walked and when they came in the next morning and the bottom cups were full of the water, they flipped. Total joy!!

Of course, we tied in St. Patrick's Day and talked about what we would do if we got to the end of a rainbow and found gold. Then, we made these cute torn paper rainbows that I love doing each year!

We also made these cute fruit loop rainbows and wrote a poem together to attach with it. This came from my sweet friend Alisha and it's free! Check it out here.

We couldn't do a Wizard of Oz unit and not watch the movie! It really is crazy how much different this movie is than the book {I know most are, but there are LOTS of differences and my kids made sure to point them out!}. One of my sweet moms got us this super cute cake and the kids were in heaven!!

Now, I'm off to enjoy this weather and get packed...we're going to Nashville tomorrow just as soon as I watch my sweet teacher neighbor {and mentee - is that a word??} get married tomorrow! :)
Happy Spring Break!!