Anyone out there?? Who knew 2 weeks could fly by so quickly?!? Who knew a 17 month old could get hand, foot, and mouth, cut two bottom teeth, miss Easter Sunday festivities, get a horrible cold, cut two top teeth, and have wretched allergies all in 2 weeks? Well, me either, but such is life lately. To top it off, we started our fabulous week of standardized testing this week {and I won't get on a soapbox about testing 5 and 6 years olds...another post, another time ;) }. Back to that cutie 17 month old that has had a rough go of it...here's a picture from this past Sunday when we had a "do-over" of Easter.

I know I'm a little biased, but could she get any cuter??
While time has been flying by, we wrapped up our insect study with butterflies. My kids were just a little obsessed since we had these in our classroom. Every morning they would immediately go over to see if all the caterpillars had made their chrysalis!

When we first began our study of butterflies, we of course learned about their life cycle. We did a little paper/pencil activity, but having the caterpillar cups in our classroom where the kids could see the life cycle actually happening really made a huge difference!

After reading some informational stories about butterflies, we charted what we learned and the kids wrote about their learning. We used watercolors to paint butterflies that we attached to our writing.

We also read one of my favorite stories, Charlie the Caterpillar. It's such a sweet story about the meaning of a true friend and also perfect to discuss how a character can change throughout a story.

Probably my most favorite activity while we study butterflies is making these caterpillar puppets to go along with the story, The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We read the story, then sequence it using pictures from my sequencing pack. Then, we use paper plates that I've cut the middle out of to glue the pieces that the caterpillar ate each day. We also write the day of the week on the back of the plates to help us in our retelling. The puppets are tube socks that I dyed green and hot glued eyes to. After we make the plates, I let the kids get in partners to retell the story. They begged to do it over and over!

My friend Deeanna created this project and it is a favorite of everyone! You have to do it if you haven't taught insects yet! It had my kids so excited about retelling a story! {Click here to see Deeanna's pack}
To celebrate our learning of butterflies, a sweet mom sent us some butterfly bubbles. The kids had a blast with them!

Last Friday, most of our butterflies had emerged, so we released them, not wanting to keep them caged for the weekend. When we came back today, the rest of the butterflies had come out of their chrysalids! It's always so funny to release them...the kids are excited and sad all at the same time! This last picture might be one of my favorites from all year...what learning is all about!

This week we're moving on to plants. I'm hoping to make things as fun as possible, since we're worn out by the time we get finished testing each morning!
Here's to a great week!

Read more »

Vickie

Y'all, this poor little blog has been a little bit neglected the past few weeks! Spring Break has come and gone {and it snowed on us!!} and we are back in full learning mode as busy as ever. Fortunately, the weather has been beautiful here {until yesterday and now there's flooding - boo!} and this sweetie and I have been in the yard almost every afternoon {hence the reason no blog posts!}.

She's finally walking pretty well {if you follow my instagram, you know we struggled a little!} and she is into everything now!
At school, we've been busy learning all about insects. This is always one of my favorite themes and my little ones are pretty into it as well! We started last week by discussing what we already knew about insects. Then, we read a non-fiction story about insects and added some new learning. We used our big bug to help us learn the parts of an insect then each of the kids made their own diagram of an insect. They turned out great!

We learned all about honeybees and wrote an interesting fact we learned.

We also learned all about ants. We wrote two interesting facts we learned and attached them to these cute ants. I gave the kids the red pieces and a big black piece and told them to make an ant. No step by step directions for this one. I love the way they all turned out so unique!

While we were learning about ants, we read Hey, Little Ant and charted reasons the boy should or should not step on the ant.

The third insect we learned about was fireflies. I don't have a non-fiction book about fireflies, so it was a good excuse to talk about other ways to do research. We charted what we learned, then the kids wrote about fireflies. We also read The Very Lonely Firefly and charted what happened in the beginning, middle, and end on a big firefly. This was a great visual for my kids to see that most of the story happens in the middle since the thorax/wings were the biggest part of the firefly.

In math, we made insects to hold our Buggy for Math journals. The kids loved doing these each day and they were great practice to get my kids thinking about which operation to use! This is part of my Buggy for Math craftivity pack. 

I used the insect fact book from that same pack to let my kids write a little informational book about insects. They turned out so cute!

Whew, that was a lot! Hopefully I'll be back tomorrow to share some of our ELA and math centers we've been using. Hope you all had a great Monday!!

Read more »

Vickie

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!!

Read more »

Vickie