Bears, Easter and Earth Day Oh My!

This week is jam packed with fun filled learning. We are moving though the reading series and I decided to continue on with the next story even though it's a short week.

For Earth Day we decorated grocery bags and handed them returned them to the neighborhood Dominicks. They will pass them on/around Earth Day. We decorated badges, wore blue, wore green , colored pictures of the earth, and wrote an acrostic to go with it. I also went to http://www.brainpopjr.com/ to see the free video on recycling, reusing and reducing. I LOVE this site. It has short videos to go along with just about every theme you could imagine! We discussed natural resources for social studies and several great Earth day books.

For the Fishing Bears story, we continued with the frog centers, but with this weeks group I changed to the correlating Bears leveled readers. We also talked about parts of a bear and labeled a picture, we did the "blubber experiment" using the scientific method and the essential question. We wrote a word web and paragraph using the 6 trait writing method. We read the story in whole group, partner, with a tape and independently.

For Easter, we decorated large eggs, had a "Guess What Is In The Egg" mystery game, made magnetic bunnies and played a math bunny game. The children *LOVED* the mystery egg game. We also made bunnies from Oriental Trading and played a really fun math graphing game.

We continued to focus on our long I, finding the main idea, sums though 12 and more.

A very busy week full of fun learning! I had time to bring each child to the small table and listen to them independently read a correlating paragraph and practice our core spelling words.

First Post and Frogs

I have recently discovered teacher blogs. Boy they are so creative. It certainly is inspiring to see how so many teachers can come together and share ideas. This last week was our Frog and Toad story. I am not super creative, but I am resourceful. Here are some of the activities we did this past week. The children loved it. They asked me everyday when we were doing centers.

Some of the activites we did were whole group and some of them centers. In the centers we did the following activites. A frog glyph, Frog/Toad diagram, HF word spinner game, Frog math spinner game, Frog handprint art project, guided reading . In whole group we did Tcharts of Frog and Toad, Frog/Toad Dialogue pictures and a seasons guilt. I had children rate their group on how they worked together at the end of the center time.

I've included the links to where I got the activities from. Thank you to all the creative teachers out there with their awesome ideas!

Frog Centers * Glyph http://www.misswhyte.com/files/back2school/FrogGlyph.pdf

*HF word spinnerhttp://www.4shared.com/get/jahEW_h0/spin_to_read_and_write_spinner.html *Math 2 digit gamehttp://swampfrogfirstgraders.blogspot.com **Research- * Venn/Diagram http://members.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/amphibians/frogs.shtml &hl=en&authkey=CLPfyJUL Art center: hand print frog: http://funhandprintart.blogspot.com/2010/01/handprint-frog-craft.html