Earth Day

Earth Day is over--I realize. But with the upcoming TCAP testing that begins tomorrow I decided to use this special day as a theme for some great review of math and language skills.

You can click on the picture to go to the file to see what type of math story problems and sentence editing skills we did. We have really tried to work on showing the strategy that is used to solve various problems. I placed the cards in the center of table groups and the kids chose a card and recorded their thinking on the recording sheet.

For the language arts--editing sentences has been a skill we have worked on in various ways. The morning message has been their favorite. For some reason it is "fun" to think the teacher makes so many mistakes!


Short post tonight as tomorrow begins the testing process. I am confident that we have covered the skills. Now it is the kids' turn to "show what they know"!

Five for Friday...a day late

I am joining Five for Friday for the first time. I know it's a day late...but I can procrastinate, can't I?

We had some great and fun activities on this week back from Spring Break.

We had planted our seeds the week before spring break and they hadn't done much of anything. So I gave them a generous water and left them for the ten days. This is what we came back to. We measured them as part of our Math study. When I glanced over this was my view so I just had to snap a picture.

 

I picked up these little plastic boxes at Dollar Tree (4 for a $1). We decorated them to use as our Wonder Boxes (from Debbie Miller's Reading With Meaning book). We've been talking about how we need to s..l..o...w  down when reading and think, wonder, question. These boxes are going to house our questions.

And of course, we began writing our questions on index cards and adding them to the boxes.

We were studying the /ou/ow/ sounds so it was perfect for writing our Ouch stories. I made a movie maker project using the song by Katherine Dines "Itchy, itchy, owie, owie, boo-boo". PRECIOUS! 

And the best...SPRING finally arrived. I didn't get a picture of us being able to PLAY on the playground but we did. For more than one day in a while. Consecutive days. Without jackets!

Spring Themed Freebie

Whew! Spring break is over. Back to the early morning wake-up call from my cell phone. Mr. Spouse says to change the song. It currently is Let it Snow (could be hoping for snow days from school). Any suggestions for a new song?

This week we will be learning all about Insects. I have lots of ideas from a FREE TPT set you can find here: Insect Gone Buggy.   

Lots of great ideas and center stations for my firsties to use. I am going to be reviewing fiction and non-fiction. I plan on giving each small group a tub of books and have them sort them into the correct category. Since I have lots of both fiction and non-fiction about insects I feel this will be a great hands-on activity for tomorrow. Then we can place the fiction in one book rack and the non-fiction in the other one.

I made a little partner activity to do on Tuesday. 

Fiction and Non Fiction Sentences 

I hope that your first day back from Spring break goes well.