That's a Wrap for 2014!

Well folks, that is a wrap for 2014 with our kiddos! One of mine thought today was the last day of school. Not yet, friend. Here are a few things we did together this week.

On Monday we read the book "Prancer" as a read aloud. Students took notes about the book to compare to the movie, which we watched the following day. They also took notes during the movie and then discussed similarities and differences. 

Today we filled out a graphic organizer to organize our thoughts for our Santa letter. The organizer included: ways you've been good/bad, things you want for yourself, things you want for your family, and things you want for the world. 

This little fellow said he was sick last year at Christmas so all he really wanted was for no one to be sick. Bless his sweet heart. He really does have a heart of GOLD.

This friend is pretty upset about her cat who has cancer so she wants for her cat to get better for Christmas. Bless her heart. It is hard to lose a pet. 

Today we also had Christmas craft rotations! My classes made Christmas tree ornaments. They turned out pretty cute if you ask me! One stuck a pipe cleaner and made me a Tennessee Vols ornament. 

The best present I got (besides the buses getting here early!) was this sweet card. This is a student who wrote me a card at the beginning of the year and I wrote her one back that mentioned how great of a writer she is, how much I appreciated her effort, etc. She told me later how much that card meant to her. This card made my day. Her mom (also a teacher at my school) also wrote on the card and told me how much her daughter felt encouraged and believed in by me. MELT MY HEART. Best.Gift.Ever.

Merry Christmas, friends!

Five for Friday

Happy Saturday, friends! Even though Doodle Bugs Teaching is taking a little mini vacation, I still wanted to share 5 things from my week with you! 

{one}

A local high school reached out to our fifth grade team asking if we would partner with their Advanced Acting class. We shared a student's writing with them and they came and acted it out. Little did we know that we teachers were also acting! We didn't know anything about it, but it was really neat and so much fun! I was so proud that the student's writing was one of my homeroom students!

{two}

Yesterday we had a school-wide Polar Express/pajama day. It was so much fun! We started the day with the performance mentioned above. Then we made Christmas foam ornaments, had lunch, watched The Polar Express, and just enjoyed a fun day. AND...we had a visit from the conductor of The Polar Express!



{three}

Another fun activity we did was our December STEM challenge which was to make snow! It was really neat and the kids LOVED it.

{four}

We finished and assessed our novel, "Which Way to the Wild West". In the back of the novel there is a section called, "What Ever Happened To...?". We picked one person from that section and wrote letters to them. 

{five}

One more week, friends! We have lots of fun things coming up next week. We are reading the book "Prancer" and watching the movie to compare. We have our Christmas party and we have one full day of Christmas craft rotations! This will be my motto for next week!

International Dot Day

Have you ever heard of International Dot Day? I hadn't heard of it until it was introduced to us at school last week. International Dot Day is inspired by Peter Reynold's book "The Dot" and is a celebration of creativity and courage. We were told about the book and asked to do a craft project in our classrooms using coffee filters.

Since we didn't have the book, I found a YouTube video of the book so I started off by playing the video to my class. It is a story of Vaski who was inspired by her art teacher to "make her mark and see where it takes her". 

We had a great class discussion of what the story meant and I was pleasantly surprised that my students realized the theme of the story. We talked about encouragement, having courage, and making our "marks" in the world. We used these free task cards to further our discussion.

Afterwards each student made a craft for Dot Day. We handed coffee filters out to each student, let them draw/make their dot, and then sprayed it with water. We let them dry before turning them in to become a school wide art project. They are now hanging in the cafeteria in front of the windows and look SO nice! 

Monday Made It

Good morning, friends! First, I hope you are enjoying my fabulous guest bloggers! So far we've had Erin from The Short and Sassy Teacher and Aris from Sailing Into Second. I'll have more guest bloggers this week so stay tuned!

Now, on to Monday Made It with Tara at 4th Grade Frolics!  

I've had this "If, Then Reading Interventions Menu" printed off for about a year. This was compiled by Jen Jones and you can find it here for free. I decided I wanted a better way to keep it together. I've had it in a binder, in a folder, etc. A few weeks ago I decided to bind my standards (see that HERE). I loved how it turned out so I decided to do the same with my Interventions Menu! 

 

My second project can be seen all over Pinterest, but I am not sure who the original idea came from. A friend of mine did this project with her children, which is where I got the idea! My 4 year old and I made an American flag shirt for him to wear on the 4th of July!

Materials: White t-shirt, painters tape, paintbrushes (we used foam), and red & blue fabric paint.

First, I taped off sections of the shirt. I ended up adding one more strip of tape at the top.

Then, we started painting! First, we painted E's hand blue and did his handprint where the stars would be. Then, he painted in between the painters tape. 

Tada! We had a cute, personalized shirt to wear for the 4th of July and a fabulous keepsake! 

Happy Monday, friends!

Nature Scavenger Hunt

This past week we went on a fun nature scavenger hunt! I knew my son would love it - he loves to be outside and loves the woods. I found this free printable from Five Little Chef's.

We own woods right behind our house so that was the perfect setting for our scavenger hunt. 

I was thinking about how you could adapt this activity for the classroom - once a teacher, always a teacher. In my previous school, we had an amazing Nature Trail that would be great for an activity like this.

We found lots of items on our list - something rough (plant) and something smooth (rock).

We found different types of leaves, a Y-shaped and odd shaped twigs, and pinecones.

We also found something yucky....two ticks on my son at the end of the night. Eeeekkkk!

We had fun doing our nature scavenger hunt!

Five for Friday {Easter Edition}

Hello y'all! I know I've been MIA for some time. I am just enjoying being a stay at home mom while I can. We've been busy playing outside, working on house projects {which are never-ending}, finishing our first soccer season, and other fun things. I just had to link up this week to show y'all some of our Easter fun! 

{one}

I picked up these cute, little, glittery eggs at The Dollar Tree. I wasn't sure what we would do with them, but I knew we could use them at home and that I could hopefully use them in the classroom when I go back.

We sorted by color and used them as manipulatives for another activity. 

{two}

Number-Dot Activity - I wrote numbers on one half of the egg and made that number of dots on the other half. We mixed them all up, sorted them into eggs with dots and eggs with numbers. E had fun matching them.

{three}

Easter Egg Addition - On another set of Easter eggs, I wrote simple addition sentences on half of the egg and the answers on the other side. This is where those cute, glittery eggs came in handy as manipulatives. E did so well with this activity! 

{four}

Easter Egg Jump - This activity involved lots of movement, which is always good! I did this activity too and wore my Polar FT4 watch to see how many calories I burned, which was 47 calories {although it felt like it should've been a lot more}. I wrote numbers on pieces of foam {you could use paper or any material you can write on}. When E picked an egg, he read the number aloud and we jumped that many times. I did numbers 1-12. So, we jumped 78 times. Then, we started all over and did the same activity, but with jumping jacks. It was a really FUN activity and E really enjoyed it!

{five}

Sadly, I don't have a picture for this but I wanted to share how I used Easter eggs in my fourth grade classroom. I love using seasonal manipultives and you can use them no matter what age you teach. In my fourth grade class, my partner teacher and I wrote down Math problems and put one in each egg. When the student got an egg, they solved the problem and then got a piece of candy if their answer was right. If it wasn't, we'd talk about where they went wrong and they were encouraged to try again and if they needed assistance, they could ask a classmate for help. It was a fun way to have some Easter fun while using standards! 

Happy Easter, friends! 

Valentine's Day Activities - Post #3

I hope you all had a fun Valentine's Day! We had the best time doing Valentine's Day activities all week. Today I am wrapping up our Valentine's Day activities with post #3. If you missed my earlier posts, just click for Post #1 and Post #2. 

Earlier in the week we sorted candy hearts by color and counted them and we also put them in coordinating colored hearts. Our last candy heart activity was to identify the first letter of the first word and sort them that way!

We practiced writing the letter V, with a heart no less, to keep the Valentine's spirit alive!

I cut out hearts and E sorted them by size and glued them down on this chart.

We put numbers in order and matched the cards that had the same number of dots.

We went on a letter V hunt! E highlighted all of the letter V's in this Valentine's passage.

We had SO much fun doing all of these holiday themed activities! I am already looking forward to St. Patrick's Day! In the meantime we will go back to doing animal themed weeks!

Valentine's Day Activities - Post #2

This is my second post of Valentine's Day activities for Preschool or younger elementary. If you missed my first post, you can view it here. 

I drew hearts in different colors on a piece of paper and let E organize them by color. Both packages that we've used of candy hearts had a lot more blue than other colors in them.

E made a pattern - green, orange, pink - on the letter V.

E sorted hearts by color.

We worked on this shape tracer - we need a little more work on it. :) 

We counted sets of hearts. I laminated these sheets and we used dry erase markers so we could erase when we finished.

We sorted pom poms by color and then put them in an ice tray using tweezers.

We lined up letters of the alphabet and matched upper and lower case letters. 

I'll have a third post coming up soon!