Earth Day and Recycle

On Earth day I shared my Target Bag with my students.  Then we sorted things to recycle:

 And things that we would put in the compost pile:

I got the sort from http://centerinabag.com/shop/

Later we played this game. Okay so we were supposed to play with contractions, but that wasn't in my lesson plans.  I wrote reduce, reuse, recycle on the spaces. We have two markers, a girl game marker and a boy marker. The children roll a die and move that many spaces. If they land on "Happy Earth Day" space, they say "Happy Earth Day" on the other spots they have to tell us something that they can reduce, reuse or recycle. 

Later, I was thinking about other things that I could show them that were also recycled. What can you think of that can be shown that is made from recycled materials?

Numbers

I created this game for the Firsties. We have been talking about place value and the difference. So in turn came this game. I created two versions. One version for tens and ones and one for ones, tens and hundreds.

We send home math games every weekend for our math groups.

So for this activity, told the children to write a "W" if they had the bigger number and a :( the the smaller number. I don't want them to think of getting a loss. :(

Get your very own:


Big and Small

Guessing

We took a look at this present and brainstormed ideas about what it could be. We knew that it was a present for a baby.  The circle ideas were our guesses. The wacky shapes are our guesses after Mr. S held the gift he gave us some more clues as what it could be. 

 Here are our guesses after Mr. S's clues.

Communication

Each week I send home a newsletter. It has our star words for the coming week, plus what we covered in math.  I discuss our lessons, but since we switch for math groups between 4 teachers, we each do our own things but the same lessons. The children carry back and forth a Parent Communication log (a steno type notebook)  that the parents and I write notes back and forth. It is a great keepsake for the year. I quickly look through them, I make sure that I write in each one each week.  One mom wrote to me on the weekends about the weather or what was going on with the family.  I lived about 30 minutes away from where I taught, so they would often have different weather.

My newsletter

I was hoping to share the document, but Google removed all the cuteness :(

Dollar Tree Tuesday's

I was loving SwampFrogs post about their own pinwheels. Okay so it was a bonus that it was cute with a frog and then to top it off it was useful too!! Of course they didn't have them at my Target :( I came across this one at the Dollar Tree. I used fabric paint. My firsties had a hard time spinning it, so I spun it and they tried to pinch it. I came up with a question that related to our story.  I was thinking of creating some "W" questions so they could ask the class or read and answer it themselves.

One thing that I do when we read our reading series story, I have the students be the teacher and ask the other students the questions. So I say "Teacher Sean you are number 3" so he reads that question.  They make sure it is the correct answer too :)  We do our reading of the story with small groups.  If at the end of the story there aren't enough questions, then we ask what is your favorite page. :)

Caterpillars

Ever had those days were time gets away from you? So I had all intention in letting the children hold the caterpillars if they wanted to.  Well then our day got all wacko due to our tornado drill. To top it all off, we didn't have school on Friday. When we came back on Monday, some of them had already turned into chrysilis'. 

As we were cleaning out the cups this was going on
{Side note: this was the one that I was holding and got the willies and had to put it down very quickly!}

Caterpillar Life Cycle

We made these life cycles for our name tags for our lockers:

We drew the leaf and then put a small pompom for the egg. We picked two different colored larger pompoms for the caterpillar.

When we did this, I had the children wait to write "caterpillar" until after they glued down the pompoms.  I wasn't sure how much space it would take.

 Later, we made these TLC art caterpillars.  I gave them a bunch of choices of colors, but they had to pick two. I gave them a red head.

Later, I hung them all up on the bulletin board above our lockers.

Here is a close-up of the white paper under our TLC Art caterpillars.  

We made these from Pixie in the lab.