April 26th- Amphibians & Reptiles

So my theme is frogs, but I have never done anything about teaching about them. I have frog stamps, frog decorations, frog... yes pretty much everything!!!

This week we will hop to it and learn all about frogs and maybe some other amphibians too. We also learned about reptiles. My friend is part of our local Herp group. It is like a humane society for reptiles and other creepy crawlies. He brought in several creatures. This is TOTALLY out of my comfort zone. My students enjoyed it immensely.

This is an American Alligator.
A 66 pound tortoise.
A corn snake that weighs about the same as your pencil.
A bearded dragon.
A boa constrictor. They even put several animals on the floor to show us how they move. Very exciting!

Seeds

I had the students predict which seeds would grow first. We had marigold, popcorn, and wildflowers.

April 19th- Plants/Soil/Worms

When I picked this topic many months ago, my main thing that I really wanted to do was do worms, namely taste them! Yes, we will be tasting worms of the gummy family! We will be looking at them, smelling them, and finally tasting them. I have a sheet for the students to fill out.We also made gardens of items that we could plant here where we live. We also got to be "Plant Designers" and design our own plants.

Okay so this plant is named after me! lol
Not sure why it went crooked :(
Love this one, a diamond plant!
Great job of a local garden.

The K-1 children drew their own flower then had to label it.

April FACE menu

We just started doing the CAFE/FACE menu with my First graders. Stay tuned, for our progress.

Earth Day

We only have one day for the ASP this week. Since it is Earth Day, I was going to have all of the children color a badge, but that would NOT be very Earth friendly! So instead, we will be reading a Dr. Jean song book. We will be sorting graphics that can be recycled into different categories. We will also be singing some songs. These include: R-E-C-Y-C-L-E by Tom Chapin and songs from Songs 4 teachers.

We will also create a BB of things that we can do to help the Earth.

Life Cycles- April 6th

We will discuss different life cycles. I have several sets of life cycle stamps that the children can stamp in the correct order. I wish that we could do things in the computer lab, so that the children could go to on line activities plus be able to create their own.

Stamps

Alligator- from a great book that has about 40 different life cycles!
Frog my favorite!
Fish- after the children cut out the pieces, they put them in order, then had to draw what came next. Then write a sentence to go along with what was in the picture.
A 4th or 5th grader who didn't follow the directions! lol
We also have books about whatever we are talking about to go along with the theme. This was perfect for the student's illustration.