All About Me and Family and Pets Themes

This year we had an All About Me weekly theme as well as a My Family and Pets theme.  During these two different weeks we did a couple of different projects that I remembered to take pictures of!

First name assessment of the year.  We'll use this same page 3 times during the year to see the growth of how students wrote their names when they came to us and how they are able to write their name before they head to kindergarten!  I'm super excited to show students their page at the end of the year!

We put some faces and bodies out for students to decorate with playdoh, pipe cleaners, wiggly eyes, beads, and other odds and ends.

 

After reading the book "A My Name is Alice" by Alice Lyne we provided students with heads and half circles.  They got to choose which pattern to use for their half circle.  Once they had the head and shirt glued on their paper (they used glue sticks), we wrote up the saying "____ my name is _____ and I like ______."  This got glued on next.  The next day we provided pieces of construction paper for mouths and hair.  They decorated their person as they saw fit using glue sponges (BEST THING EVER!)  Once they were done I gave them their initial letter (which I had cut out) to glue onto the first blank of the saying.

 

Once we finished our people, we went to work on our names in small groups.  Students were provided with a paper that had their name printed in gray on it.  They then used bingo daubers to cover the letters.  This also helped me gauge fine motor and color identification skills.

 

When we finished both components they went on our bulletin board in the hallway!  They look amazing and we've gotten so many wonderful compliments!  I got the idea from Pinterest.

Another activity we did during our family theme was to provide students with sentence strips and ask them to draw their family on the sentence strip. 

Pete the Cat I Love My White Shoes

During the first week of school we read lots of Pete the Cat books.  After reading Pete the Cat I Love My White Shoes they drew on shoes I had cut out of white cardboard.  As they were coloring we talked about the colors and what might have caused them to turn that color.  For example, if they colored with green maybe they stepped in green Jell-O, etc.  It was a great way for me to probe color identification in a fun way.
 

After we finished our shoes, we dyed shoelaces using liquid watercolors.  These came out so nicely!  I was very pleased with how vivid the colors were!

 

When their shoelaces were dry, they laced their shoes up.  (I had punched 6 holes in each shoe).

Finally, we used them to display next to the shoes I had up from the welcome to school bulletin board I had put up for the first day of school.

Christmas Bulletin Boards

This first picture continues to amaze me!  I was going to be out for the afternoon so I decided to leave a little art project for the end of the day.  I left paper with ornaments drawn on them, yarn, fancy scissors, decorative paper, sequins, etc.  I had put up the black paper and red border, and told them they could hang their ornaments themselves.  When I came in the next day I was astonished how great the board looked!  They did such a nice job and were so creative with their designs!

Idea from: http://firstgradeblueskies.blogspot.com/2013/12/easy-ornament-bulletin-board-freebie.html

This is our bulletin board out in the hallway.

Craftivity found at: http://allisonspeechpeeps.blogspot.com/2012/12/christmas-speech-craftivity-freebie.html

It's a two part board.  The top part has Christmas trees that they wrote analogies on.  They came up with analogies and then write them on the ornaments.  For example read:words::count:numbers.

 

The bottom part of the board has Christmas presents.  Students cut out verbs and sorted them as past or present verbs.

 

 

100th Day Celebrations

Here are some pictures from our 100th Day celebration. We did 100th Day Mosaics. First, we had a lesson on the history of Mosaics (and WOW! I have to say I sure did learn a lot while I was researching them and making my PowerPoint!) Then they did a picture and writing for "When I'm 100 Years Old" and "If I had $100". Some of them were PRICELESS! One student was going to keep her money in a safe with lasers and pig guards and if her brother tried to steal it melted stinky cheese would squirt all over him...and others were going to buy a lot of duct tape (hmmm....who would have thought kids would be making hairbands and bracelets out of duct tape?! MacGyver would definitely approve!) And yet another 100 year old student would be writing a book about their life. 

January 2013 Happenings

Here are a couple of the things we did in January in fifth grade:

First, after conducting an experiment about force, we used Excel to graph our results.  Students entered in the data, used a formula to find the average, and then graphed it.  Then of course the exciting part for them: PLAYING WITH ALL THE COLORS!  I reminded them that the important thing was that you could read their graph, which *most* of them kept in mind!  They have asked several times since when we were going to do another experiment that needed a graph!

 

And of course we had to do something for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! 

I found a GREAT product on TpT from Howywood Kindergarten!

It was reasonably priced and very user friendly!  I highly recommend it!

 

 

First, I printed the 26 quotes (included in the product from Howywood Kindergarten) onto cardstock. 

Next, students picked a quote that was meaningful to them and thought about what the quote meant to them.  Then, they wrote about it in the thought bubble. Students took their quote and used watercolors to paint over the quote.  Finally, when they were finished they completed the Martin Luther King, Jr. craftivity.  The craftivity was ALSO in the product from Howywood Kindergarten!

 

Here are a couple of close up pictures:

 

 

We got A LOT of compliments on this display!  One teacher even took the time to email my class a letter telling them how much she, as well as her students, enjoyed their display.  This made their day!  It was absolutely WONDERFUL! 

Shoal Watercolor Paintings

WOW! It's been over a month since I last blogged. I guess that just goes to show teachers ARE super busy!

So...here we are in November and we are up to our ears in learning! We're finishing up DARE, our unit on nouns, physical science, etc.

In social studies we've been studying different European explorers. One of our most recent explorers was John Cabot. Since I'm also required to teach art, I combined the two (thanks to the idea in Evan-Moor's Explorers of North America Pocket Books) and got this lovely display shoals!

One of the things I was most proud about is we talked about how the deeper in the ocean you get, the darker the water gets...you can see several of them really took that into consideration in their painting!

Here's a picture of the sign, close up.